Following Up

the day after Willie got a hair cut, it started falling out. Now basically he is shedding, and the hair is thinning out, and he keeps complaining to me that I should have let him shave it. I keep hoping that he will keep his hair, eyebrows, leg hairs, etc but it’s just not happening. We tried a lint brush in the arm and leg hairs. It works!

Yesterday he looked on MyChart which is the medical scheduling program used by the hospital. It showed that he missed a phone call from Susan Butler,ARPN, NP-C (Advanced Registered Nurse Practicioner, Oncology, Hematology) for 7/28/25. There was no appointment time for this Thursday’s labs & chemo as there should have been when after last Friday’s meeting with her. He got on the phone and sent a message through the portal since it showed his next chemo as August 6th! They called back and said it was a mixup and the is now back on the calendar for labs tomorrow and chemo #2 on Thursday, 7/31. We are a week behind schedule due to the low WBC (white blood cell) count from last week. Hopefully tomorrow they will have improved enough that he can do round two. The delay worked into our hands though and here’s why……

On Friday, the contractor showed up to start pulling out all our cherry trees. They did about 300 trees on Friday. Then on Saturday, our good friends (Cindy & Kevin Lee and Joe & Debbie Kramer) came over to help us move the sprinkler pipes to a safe spot for future use so they didn’t get torn out with the trees. We finished that by 11am and were able to have some lunch and a good visit. Adam & Amber came too with his excavator and removed the trees by the 8 valves so they didn’t get ruined and break our pipes so we couldn’t water. They were amazing and we were thrilled this got done!! Bright and early on Monday morning, the contractor showed up to finish tearing down the trees. Literally it is a terrifying thing to watch, very violent, quite amazing. It looks devastating around here. Today, they came and took out the last 200 or so trees (we had 1455 cherry trees) and began chipping them all up so that we don’t have to burn it all. They’ll be back again tomorrow to finish the chipping. Willie will grade the rows, take the chips and put them back into the rows, replace the sprinklers, and then will just have to mow each week. Having an orchard was his dream. We looked so hard to find the perfect one and now we were forced to find a new path onto the future due to the cost of producing our beautiful cherries. Just know it was a good run for us. We both really enjoyed having a cherry orchard for the past 8 years. Both of us are looking forward to the future and what we will do now that the trees are gone and we no longer have that expense (time and money).

Now let’s get rid of this damn cancer too!!!

Comments

  1. Ann GJuly 29, 2025 at 9:13 PM

    An end of an era. Once all the hard work is done I am sure it will be beautiful.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Staging Done, Time to Start

Image
Ready or not, here we go.  Cherry season picking for our orchard starts on 6/29 this year.  Ready or not, here we go... or maybe not.  Pablo says he only has 6 pickers this year vs. the usual 15 to 18.  Maybe we won't pick.  That's not enough to get the cherries off the trees.  Neighbors have no pickers to spare.  If we have enough pickers we can finish picking Lapins in 3 days.  Then wait a week and on to Sweethearts which would only take 2 days to get them off the trees.  So, if we have enough pickers we could be though the pick by 7/10 or 7/11.   Ready of not, here we go.  We met with the oncologist yesterday, Dr. Voshtina.  She laid out the plan for Willie's treatment to attack his esophageal cancer.  Good news is it hasn't spread.  Bad news is it's agressive and spreads fast so must be attacked quickly.  We are on the calendar for surgery to install a port for the week of 7/7, right in the middle of cherry p...
Read more

Hair Loss & Cancelled Chemo

Image
Tuesday, Willie got a hair cut. This was delayed from earlier this month when he had to reschedule but it was time. He didn’t get it buzzed off because I just didn’t think that would be good. So Elise just cut it short. The next day, Wednesday 23rd, he tried seeing if it would come out and sure enough it did! Of course I made him pose for a few photos which he dearly loves. Here’s one …. guess he won’t have hair for long. That said, it was a busy week this week. Willard got someone to provide a bid to pull out all our cherry trees. We are done, but that’s another story. He traded in the sprayer for a Kubota diesel side by side. And finally, when he got his labs yesterday, they cancelled his chemo today due to his white cell counts were just super low. He needs to get those up before they can give him rip d two. So he got a shot today of something that will bring up his white blood cell count to more normal. If that happens, he’s back on the calendar for next week, Thursday the 31st. Th...
Read more

It's All Happening

Image
Cancer really sucks! It sucks the energy out of you and those around you. Willie and I are super lucky to be surrounded by many good friends and famiily. For that, we are grateful.  Cherry harvest began on Sunday, 6/29 and we were both up bright and early to greet the crew. It's been hard to find pickers but Pablo came through for us again this year with a small but professional group. It was super exhausting for Willie (and me too) and emotionally draining as well. Tuesday was so hard, they went long, it was 100 degrees out, and the warehouse took 45 minutes to unload the truck while cherries were boiling in the bins on the back of it. Yesterday we called it quits, with 103 bins total (about 32,000 pounds) which is approximately half the orchard. The rest of the fruit will hang on the trees and rot unless anyone comes to take them for free. We will pull the trees out this year and just mow grass from here on out. We have learned that growing...
Read more