Focht Family Blog

After the Pinewood Derby we went back to St. Mary’s for another CV3 camping trip. While we were there we met one of the local party animals, Paris. She is a deer that was abandoned and has adopted the state park as her home. We were told it was okay to feed her vegetables. Here is my mom trying to get her to eat a piece of celery…

Here is Samantha trying to make friends…

There was also a pack of wild pigs that ran around. I decided not to get too close so here is a picture of them through our rainy windshield…

Paris decided she really liked our campsite so one of the days she stayed by our fire and laid down for a few hours. Here is a picture of Paris by herself and a couple of Samantha bonding with her…

This must be the month. First, Andrea received good news. The lymph node contained tissue that is supposed to be gone in adults. I heard sinus tissue, mom heard thymus tissue… not sure which it was. Anyways, no malignancy was found. They are meeting with the oncologist this week to decide if they need to do anything with it. The thoracic surgeon wants her to have another CT scan in three months and if it has grown he will want to remove it at that point.

Today we had to take Misty to an emergency vet and she ended up with a biopsy. On Monday or so she had a small dime sized raw spot on her front paw behind the pad (like at her wrist area). Thursday morning we woke up to blood everywhere. She had chewed on it until it was a 3-4″ square of raw skin. I have been rinsing it with peroxide and bandaging it but she has been crying a lot and she has been wanting to lay outside. Nathan thinks that might be because nobody is bumping into her outside. However, she hasn’t eaten anything for 2 days and ate very light the 2 days before that. She is barely drinking water and today she was breathing strangely with shivers.

The vet looked at it. She was concerned it might have been a mast cell tumor. They gave her pain meds, sedated her slightly and cleaned out the wound. She prepared a slide from what was in the wound and said she thought she saw mast cells so then we had to wait longer so she could take a biopsy to send to the lab and also do a chest x-ray to see if there was anything in her lungs. Her lungs are clear. We will know by Tuesday if Misty’s biopsy shows cancer.

Andrea is my sister-in-law in Atlanta. This week has been very busy and most of it has been spent worrying about Andrea. On Friday, she went to the hospital with chest pains. They scanned her chest and found that she had lymph nodes that were enlarged. What they saw looked like cancer so they sent her to an oncologist. The oncologist told her he thought it was most likely Hodgkins Lymphoma and she went today to see a thoracic surgeon about getting a biopsy. They are going to try to do it through her trachea or through a small incision in her neck. If they do, she will be back home that same day and be fine. If not, they will have to go through her chest or back which will have a 10 day recovery. After the biopsy comes back, they will do a PET scan if it is malignant. Depending on the results of the scan they will then test her bone marrow. She is supposed to have the biopsy on Tuesday and if they end up having to go through the chest or back then mom will be traveling to Atlanta to help out while she recovers. They have two daughters who are 4 and 2.

We did a few things in Missouri and Minnesota. I have put the pictures on my computer but haven’t gotten farther than that. Samantha is in her last week of school and then 3rd grade is done!! Tomorrow we will be on our way to Iowa for a few days. I will update everything this weekend once school is over.

We made it home from New Mexico with only one casualty. We lost the “Newmar” rock guard off the back in Mississippi. They said the damage it caused would be covered because it shouldn’t have fallen off. We arrived home and moved all of our remaining belongings into the RV and got everything settled. We were supposed to close on the house on Wednesday but 2 hours before closing we were told the buyer’s VA loan fell through. They are now in the process of trying to find loan funds from another source. Hopefully the house will close this next week but we will not be there since we were already planning business trips for this week.

The only other drama this week is the first personal injury in the RV. I tripped over the slide while the RV was moving and broke my toe. This is only my second broken bone in almost 35 years so I think that is a pretty good record. My first broken bone was in 1997 and it was caused by my husky jumping over me and breaking my nose. Anyways, I am going to work this week on figuring out how to make my pictures smaller so it doesn’t take as long to load the blog. Either that or figure out how to archive all but the last two posts or so. We are in Milledgville, GA for the holiday weekend camping with Nathan’s parents. Then we leave Monday to start driving towards Virginia.

Our plans have changed. Last night we received a phone call that my grandfather was being taken to the hospital. He was placed in CCU and is dying. We will now be in Atlanta in 2 weeks instead of this weekend. We left Lexington, KY this morning and are headed back to Savannah, GA.

In better news, I think we will probably be buying mom’s Travel Trailer this week so I will post pictures of it once we get it.