The Ross Family: Regional Champs

I intended to update the blog this weekend, but we ended up going out of town at the last minute and didn't get home until late Sunday night. This weekend was a blast, in that at the last minute Abby got a chance to play in a 3v3 State Championship Tournament because one of the sweet girls on the team broke her arm a couple days before the tournament. Abby was super excited to get to play with some of her new teammates and we were excited to get out of town as a family to do something that was not centered around Dr's appointments, surgery, heart defects, or cancer... we got to have a pretty "normal" family weekend! We laughed a lot, got to meet some of Abby's new teammates and their families (who couldn't have been sweeter), and the cherry on the top was that their team won the tournament!!!

Andrew and Grace were the team mascots at Abby's tournament this weekend!

-Abby had her appointment with the spine specialist yesterday and God showed off big time... the doctor said Abby's back is totally fine! He said Abby does have a sway back, but it's just the way she was made (just like her Daddy's body) and not a problem. Giant praises for a piece of good news!!!

-Andrew started his new chemo treatment last Monday and so far so good in terms of side effects (we just don't know if it's working yet). He did get his first canker sore yesterday, so we need to do a better job of using his steroid mouth wash (it's hard because he hates it) multiple times a day. His pain has been pretty well managed with only a few episodes of breakthrough/really bad pain, which is another huge praise!!! Will you please pray the mouth sores don't get worse because that is what often times causes patients to have to take a break from the medication because it can become unbearable. Please also pray that we can continue to keep his pain well controlled and even more than that, we would see some improvement in his pain because the treatment is working. That would be crazy awesome.

I was pretty defeated after our appointment with Andrew's Oncologist here in Texas last week because he seemed to lack hope. God reminded me that I shouldn't be surprised he doesn't share in the same level of hope we have because his hope isn't in Christ. We are going to hope on with crazy big hope because we serve a God that is bigger than our definition of whatever crazy hope is. As it says in scripture... to Him who can do exceedingly, abundantly, beyond anything we can think or imagine, that is Who we are placing our hope in! When I see, read, or hear y'all share how you are hoping on with us, it is water to my parched soul, so thank you and please continue to join us in hoping on! #butGod

At Andrew's last blood draw, his liver enzymes were 10x the upper limit of normal :-/, so that is one of the reasons we had to tinker with his pain meds last week in an effort to pull back on the use of Tylenol. Please pray his constant use of Tylenol was the cause of his elevated liver enzymes or that it was just an isolated incident on this lab draw, otherwise this could be a sign of his liver function being impacted by all of the lesions in his liver. **** Just got lab results back and another HUGE praise is in order... his liver enzymes are normal!!!

Any time Grace tries to snuggle the dogs she asks us to take a picture