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ABC
By Margot | April 23, 2008
Last Friday after the MagicWater meeting Melissa Mikulak set up a surfing lesson for herself, me, Dr. Sholler and Melissa Kipp, our awesome volunteer project manager from Boston. Not only did we have a perfectly beautiful Southern California day with dolphins swimming and jumping right off the shore, but we also had Michael Willis, one of the famous Willis brothers http://www.wbsurfing.com/ as our instructor. It was like get a surfing lesson from (as the Mikulaks said) Spicolli or, if you need a more recent movie reference, he reminded me of Chicken Joe from Surf’s Up. He was a fantastic instructor and if there is a more authentic California Surfer Dude, I don’t who it would be.  He gave us all safety tips before we started. Here is what I learned (aside from the fact that I “have Willis Brother hair”):  Do the stingray shuffle in the sand- meaning shuffle your feet so you don’t step on a stingray. If you get caught in a rip current, you don’t swim sideways like the “dummyguards” teach you, you swim to the nearest wave and let it take you in. If you swim sideways, you may either have to swim a very long way or just end up getting cycled back into the rip current.  Never put anything between you and the wave – meaning your surfboard (or anything else) will clobber you if a wave comes along and smashes it into you, so don’t put it in front of you. If you fall off, fall back, not forward. If you do fall off, don’t panic and don’t pop up right away, just cover your head (so you don’t get clobbered by your surfboard, wait a bit for the next wave to pass by and “you’ll come up, you will.” That led us to the last and most important safety tip ABC: Always be cool, calm and collected. His example for this one was “If your house is on fire, what do you do? You don’t panic. You, (he take a big breath and shakes his hands out) take a breath and then, (pointing a finger) OK priorities.” I’m not describing it very well, you really had to be there. Â
Extrapolating the ABC line of thinking to cancer, I did not post last week’s numbers so as not to scare the *(**&! out of people. And, they were back down this week. See how I’m not giving you specific numbers? I’m forcing you to ABC this week too. Sam is doing well, feeling fine, having fun at school, and shooting a lot of hoops lately with Andy. His school had a jogathon this morning and I went to make sure he was holding up ok.  He really wanted to run but he got to tally everyone’s laps and spray them in the face with a water sprayer as they ran by and he was happy with that. He made me a card in his reading class today – made my day. It said “A Card for Someone Special” and he wrote “Mom,” and he drew a picture of us together and then his sentence about why I am special was “You halp me all the time.”   Andy is doing fine, his preschool is having an art show in a couple of weeks and his teachers say that he has done some amazing art so we’re looking forward to seeing it.  He can’t wait for kindergarten and Sam is very excited to have him in the same school. He was telling me at the jogathon today that next year he and Andy can run together.  Charlie can say “elephant”, “bird” and basically will repeat anything you ask him to repeat now. He loves to read CURIOUS GEORGE RIDES A BIKE. That’s the only book he’ll read lately. In fact, if you offer him another he’ll bat it away and say “ooh ooh aahh ahh” – his word for monkey. His affection does not extend to any of the other Curious George books though – only the one about the bike. He can say both Sim and Annee pretty well for the boys names and he has a great sense of humor.
We did meet with Dr. Willert last week and the official read from Dr. Harvey on the March MIBG scan was that it looked the same as the previous one to him and that the first guy “overcalled” it.  Huh. So, good news for us. We’ll do another scan on May 15th to keep an eye on things. The MagicWater meeting went well – there is a lot research underway and soon to be underway. It was great for me to finally get to meet Dr. Sholler and Pat Lacey.Â
Thanks to everyone for the comments and emails. I’ll promise to post more specifics next week. Â
“Live every day like it’s the last day of summer.” That’s a surfer line for any of you who were wondering.
MargotÂ
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Topics: Progress Reports | 3 Comments »
April 23rd, 2008 at 10:39 pm
Hey there,
Great post, but, what ARE the numbers (-:?
you can send ’em direct…
L,
Meryl
April 24th, 2008 at 3:10 am
I think you did a great job of describing the Big Kahuna!!! That whole speach still makes me laugh. Nice work remembering all the safety rules!
April 28th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
I’m all for an endless summer!
VB
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