It's August......! Hockey starts in 1 month!

Hi Everyone, Earl and I had a great time in Montreal and after a brief but fun visit home (Earl went to Jeff and Natalie's for respite and I got away with some friends for some quilting R&R) we headed out to Calgary and Banff. We had such a nice visit and Banff just has this way of melting off the stress so much so that you can feel it as it leaves your body. One of the things Earl really wanted to do, let's call it his bucket list was white water rafting. (just so you know it's on my list too) We did it, we can now say we conquered the Kicking Horse River and it was a BLAST, only Earl was a little frightened. By chance we were able to hook up with a good friend of ours, Kyle Chernetz who is a WWR guide and so it helped us both feel a lot more comfortable than we would have felt had he not been our guide. I highly recommend it to affiliate any stress.

There is news about Earl, so here we go. The biopsy results indicate that Earl's cancer is in fact osteogenic sarcoma, so now that we have wasted several months we can continue on with the first plan. Surgery. Earl has been referred to a surgeon in Toronto for surgery to remove the tumor from his body. I won't give any details, yet but after our Medical Video Conference on Tuesday August 16th we hope to have more information. If surgery is offered and Earl decides to go ahead, it will take place in Toronto. The tumor continues to grow and at the last CT scan the kidney was 16.3cm! Look it up...that means it is close to 2x the size of his other kidney. Because of the continued growth Earl is experiencing increasing pain and is having difficulties with peeing and his leg is swollen. Not fun at all.

Stay in touch, and please hold Earl up in prayer as this is a very frightening time for him.

Love you all Debbie!