As more people start reading my blog a comment that came up was that it seemed like they were looking into our lives. One of Mel’s coworkers commented about it and she said that it was all public. It was easier to share updates over this as opposed to trying to keep everyone up to date. As it was clear from the GoFundMe there were quite a lot of people interested in keeping in touch with me and reading about how I was doing. Prior to the GoFundMe I had approximately 150+ people reading the blog. I am not exactly sure who is reading it, but there were quite a lot. Last time I had checked, after the GoFundMe it had ballooned to over 450. Some people have even gone way back to 2021 and read it from there. What I think was important to share though was an insight into what I was going through day to day. It may be an intimate reflection of what happened, but it served two purposes. One for me track how my day actually was and to give people reassurance that I am doing ok. Not every day is great and I think that it is important to show that. I think that it is important to let your guard down at times and let people in. Last night we were chatting with Xavier and we asked him if his friends or anyone asked him about this and how things were going. He said parents asked him how I was doing and he would always reply fine, because from his perspective I was always fine. The kids are aware that I am going through this but all they see is me going through life for the most part normally. Some days are harder than others and I need their help, but I manage to push through those days and recover. I think what the lesson that they are learning is, you can have weakness, you can ask for support, but you need to have the resilience to make it through. Do not take it and wallow in self pity. One day the kids may want to read all of this and they will understand a bit better of what we went through with the daily grind of things.
Last night the power went out and Mel’s first thought was that I would be stressed about the servers. She was not wrong. The servers do not like getting suddenly shut down and it is a pain in the ass to get them all up and running. When I started to get sick though I anticipated a time where I might not be able to spend a couple of hours figuring out what went wrong with the servers and getting them up to speed. What I ended up doing was writing a lengthy script that would go through the regular problems and self correct. I thought it worked last time and booted the servers up and hoped that it would work. Initially I thought it failed as I could not access anything, but after 10 minutes everything came back up. Everything worked as expected. There are still a lot of things that I need to pass off to Mel so she knows how things work. The servers should be self-sufficient for another year and then we will need to add in another 24TB for the following year. I think that I will need to teach Olivier how to build a server and set it up this summer. Then in the future as space decreases he can tell his mom and ask for more money to buy more hard drive space and she will say no. He will then come to me and I will ask how much do we need and buy double. I do not think that our kids are foolish enough to ask one parent and then the other as normally Mel and I support each other in the decisions. But sometimes I want what the kids want as well and can convince her to get it. That is why we decided to get a puppy today right before we go on our trip! I am kidding, we have no interest in getting a family pet. Ever.
In the past I had bought several Samsung Smarttags and Tiles and you would think that I would know where I had put them. I can not find most of them, but I had a bunch in boxes still so we will activate those. I need to replace the batteries in them as some of them are from 2018 it seems. We had originally purchased them way back for when we were originally going to Disney in 2020, so the batteries are all dead. They unboxed ones were cleverly gathered and put away in a secure box somewhere. The issue is that I do not remember where that secure box is and Mel insists that this was my responsibility. She is clearly assigning blame to me instead of attacking the problem. Everything tech related in the house is my responsibility but I think that this is a we problem that I can not find it because I can not remember where I put them.
This morning as I ate my cereal, the memories of my jaw locking up and the aversion to cold seems like a distant problem. Minor inconveniences I can forget about fairly quickly and it is not much of a concern until the next time. The drainage tube inserted into my body I do not have pleasant memories of and I tend to remember the first time years ago when I had a tube in me and the pain of having it removed. Even when they removed it this time I feel the pain and I wait in anticipation for the excruciating pain that never came luckily. I am able to eat more and function more normally now. This is what the kids remember from my day to day operations and why they do not think that the cancer is a big deal. I did not sleep well last night as I had to get up to pee every couple of hours. This was a good sign as I was quite tired and instead of incontinence I woke up. I am still wearing the undergarments and we will bring them along as it is too high of a risk if there is a failure and it is quite minor to be wearing it. As I get more treatments done, everything is getting more manageable. We will see what this next treatment in Spain brings. Since I will be 6 hours ahead I think that I should be able to update daily still. I will start posting pictures if we have anything interesting happening.
QHM