Things I am thankful for…

Posted by Sammy on Nov 25th, 2009 | one comment

In light of the Thanksgiving holiday I figured I’d post about things I’m most thankful for. This year more than ever I’m so genuinely thankful for so many things.

So here is my list of what I’m thankful for:

1) I’m most thankful for my wonderful husband. I know it sounds corny to be thankful for your spouse but this year I REALLY mean it. Summer ’09 was a summer I’d rather forget because it was the summer I saw my husband dwindle away right before my eyes. Every treatment that he endured he got weaker and weaker and the symptoms got oh so much better too! Kidding of course Just knowing that he’s still here with us makes me so thankful. He’s been through a lot and this cancer road is not over yet either. It has forever changed us both but ultimately it has brought us 1000x closer. I can only hope that Gary will be able to celebrate many more Thanksgivings with Mikey and me.

2) I’m thankful for our son, Michael. He doesn’t realize this yet, but he can easily put a smile on our faces even when times are just plain ole craptastic. Even with the full on terrible two’s he still manages to do something cute or silly that makes you crack a smile. He has been soooooooo important to both of us during this trying year. Just knowing that we were going home to our little guy and how excited he’d be every time to see us, well it gives you a purpose to live, and honestly I needed Gary to have a purpose to live.

3) I’m thankful for our wonderful friends that have been there for us this last year. People offering up whatever they could to help us out since let’s be honest it was not easy to get on a plane every 3 weeks to watch my hubby get dosed up with more nasty drugs. Some friends just being able to be a shoulder to cry on or an ear to hear my vents. Without all of our friends I don’t know how we could have kept sane.

4) I’m thankful for the wonderful doctors and nurses at the NIH for keeping Gary alive and close to cancer-free. They not only gave him a definitive diagnosis, but even with the horrible treatment he was on he was always treated nicely. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, I wish hospitals were like this all over the place because it would make our health care system so fabulous. What was always nice about the folks at the NIH was that Gary was always treated like a person, not just some patient and for that I’m greatly thankful.

I hope you all have a fabulous Thanksgiving holiday and don’t forget to be thankful for all that you do have.

Light the Night 2009 a night to remember

Posted by Sammy on Nov 10th, 2009 | 2 comments

Our first ever Light the Night walk was the most amazing experience ever. Our fabulous team, Gary’s Guardian Angels, ended up raising over $3k for the LLS! That is a heck of a lot more than my initial goal of $1000 too That is $3k more that can go towards research and helping out patients that they didn’t have before we raised it. For us research is HUGE just because Gary’s form of lymphoma (Peripheral T-Cell Lymphoma) is soooooooo very rare. Not many people have it and of those not many participate in clinical trials, which makes research very very precious. So if the money we’ve raise can help out with that at all then that’s FABULOUS!

We had a kick ass banner that had a collage of pictures from Gary’s chemo treatments that filled in each letter of his name. I thought it kicked ass even if it didn’t with the banner contest

Here’s our fabulous banner:

Here is one of my favorite pictures from the night. It was taken after we first arrived. Mikey wanted to play airplane with daddy and I just so happened to get a pic of Mikey going in for a big hug with his daddy and more importantly you can see Gary’s fancy shmancy Survivor shirt.

One of the most touching moments of the night was witnessing something between Gary and his coworker, Gretchen. A little backstory, Gretchen has been very involved with the LLS for years. Her mom died of leukemia several years back. Well, she has been a huge supporter of Gary’s fight against lymphoma. She managed to raise over $1k in a matter of just 4 days for the walk! Talk about a kick ass fundraiser. I surely need to get tips from her for next year Well if you raise over $1k you get a fancy Bright Lights t-shirt and a medal. Well she got her medal and came straight to Gary to present the medal to him. I was standing right there and had the camera around my neck and snapped this photo. The look on his face says it all, he was completely in shock and humbled by her fabulous gesture.

I don’t think that’s a moment that any of us will ever forget.

All in all the night was amazing. It’s really hard to describe in words how awesome it is to see all of these people with red (for supporters), white (for survivors), and gold balloons (for walking in memory of). But to see the sea of balloons build up as the walk starts, even as windy as it was, its just absolutely breathtaking. To be around soooooo many others that feel just as strongly about coming closer to a cure for blood cancers its just something that is so absolutely amazing and I am so grateful to have taken part in such an awesome event.

Here is a quick team pic as we started off on the walk, its not everyone, but it was the best we were gonna do at the time.

I’m already excited for the 2010 walk, you better believe the Zullo’s will be making this is regular event for our family, and we willl be beating this year’s fundraised amount too!!!!

So the rest of the results….

Posted by Sammy on Nov 5th, 2009 | one comment

Well late last week Gary got a call from the main doc on the research team to tell him about the results of his blood flow cytometry. Turns out his blood is still positive for lymphoma. No surprise there, why would it be negative really? Gosh you’d think the marrow, that creates these blood cells, which is negative would impact the freaking blood, but nope not enough. The good thing about it is that his blood has improved. Apparently before chemo it was something like 66% then after round 4 it went down to around 30% and then at this restaging it was down to around 6%. So a pretty decent improvement. We’ll take it, that’s all we can do at this point.

Right now he’s a wait-n-watch. He’ll go back up to the NIH for another restaging in January. They are hoping that once his immune system kicks into high gear it’ll take care of the rest of the bad cells. I can only hope because he really needs a break from chemo. A nice LONG break would be ideal, like I’m talking forever kind of long.

So we’ll remain positive. His body WILL take care of the rest of this. He’s a fighter and a damn good one too. If anyone can beat Lymphoma its Gary.