Start it Up

Welcome to the Thomas Family Blotter!

After much thought, delay, and requests, we are now on the web now with updates for the Thomas Family!

We are still enjoying life here in lovely Pacifica, CA. Caleb is in the fifth grade and doing great. Ian is doing really well and enjoying second grade. Kathy is volunteering as much as possible at the boy’s elementary school, Ortega. I am still working with Amgen, and looking over our engineering and construction work in Fremont, South San Francisco, and Seattle, WA.

For those that have been following the progress with Ian:

We are now in month 16 of Ian’s, and our family’s, journey with Anaplastic Large Cell Lymphoma. As some of you may know, we thought it was gone after the initial 11 months of chemo and radiation, but we found another hot spot on the PET scan at the first reassessment in Nov 08’. This really hurt, and left us without a clear path forward.

Since then we have moved to Stanford’s Children’s hospital, and after much prayer and study, and consults the best doctors and staff around, Ian started on a new experimental chemo about 7 weeks ago. Much to everyone’s joy and thankfulness, the 6th week scans have shown that the new therapy is working, and there has been almost full response. We will continue on this same path for the next 6 weeks and reassess again. If it still shows that it is working, then we then continue it for at least the next year.

Since this is experimental, we really don’t when this will be complete and we can call it done.

Ian has been able to stay in school, and he is doing really well right now, with a lot of energy, and with really low side effects of this chemo. He is looking forward to baseball this year, and did really well in the evaluation a couple weeks ago.

Much is going on outside of our immediate family, but I’ll do that another time. If you’ve come this far, I promise I’ll keep it shorter next time and cover the rest of our lives. Thanks and God Bless