My spouse may have died, but our relationship certainly didn’t. If you ever walk into my home, you will see pictures of my Rex all over. On the tables, the wall, the fridge, the window sills… everywhere. The beautiful urn that holds his ashes sits on the table by my bed with his picture beside it. You will also see a polished rock with a cross on it that he was given to carry in his pocket during his cancer journey. That rock was a gift to remind him that Christ is always with him and that he is never alone. I believe Nate Gautier sent it to him when we were in Houston, and he absolutely loved it.

Dearest Friends,

I wanted to write this entry for a couple of different reasons. One is to thank you all for the prayers, love and support you continually showed us over the last year. You have no idea how much it meant to us. Rex would read every single comment you wrote several times. Especially when he was having a tough day. I would often find him re-reading all of your posts and comments. Your words encouraged him greatly and he felt the love and appreciated your prayers so very much.  

Needless to say, life without my best friend has been excruciating. When you, or someone you love, receive(s) a stage lV cancer diagnosis, you know the outcome will more than likely not be a good one. But even so, as believers in Christ, we pray that God will spare our loved one and give us a miracle. There is absolutely no way to prepare your heart for anything other than that. I will be the first to admit that I truly thought God was going to answer our prayers for healing. Right up to the very end. Even when I saw Rex slowly slipping away from me a little more each day, I still believed. But in complete transparency, with that came denial as well. I now realize that I lived my days in a lot of denial of what was happening to him. Maybe it was a coping tool that God gave me to get me through the day to day, or maybe it was just the indescribable love I had for him and couldn’t fathom what was happening. Whatever the case, I couldn’t imagine ever losing him. But as we all know, January 6, 2022 Jesus called him home. And the last day of my sweet Rex’s life was, and always will be, the very worst day of mine.

On Monday, they put a permanent drain directly into Rex’s abdomen to drain fluid as it builds up (which it does quickly). It is an easy process for us at home as we just turn on the “tap” every other day to drain between 500-1000cc’s of fluid. It brings him a lot of relief from…

We are on day 6 of being inpatient at MD Anderson. There is a lot to update. Wednesday and Thursday were extremely hard. On Wednesday, they did a scope and what they said would be a 10-minute procedure turned into an hour and a half. His bile ducts were extremely constricted and blocked, so they added in another stent (this one plastic) in his bile duct to help with the drainage. The surgeon said…

Things have definitely been rough lately. The punches have been coming at us like a prize fighter in a championship title round. I admit, we are a little beaten up, but we are still in the ring! Life’s issues don’t take a break when you receive a cancer diagnosis. You just now have that disease on top of everything else that we all deal with on a daily basis. Bills continue to accumulate; work still needs to be done; relationships can completely fall apart … the list goes on and on. The stresses of life can be fierce. And lately…

Sorry it’s been a while since our last entry. There have definitely been some challenging days, but we keep our eyes on Christ and the good days he has blessed us with. Rex had a CT scan this past Tuesday, along with blood work. And we met with Dr. Wolff the following morning…

As I type this out, we are at MD Anderson getting round 14 of chemo. Things have been a bit rough lately, and I wish I had more encouraging news to share with you all…

We’ve been a bit quiet lately as we’ve been dealing with a few challenges. I’m not going to beat around the bush, so to speak, but jump right in and save the more personal note for later in the update.

Rex and I both tested positive for COVID on July 27th. Fortunately, we both had milder cases and were treated with different processes. He received antibodies at MD Anderson and…