Pictures...to tell more of the story.

We have taken a lot of pictures throughout Jacob's battle and there are more of them at home.  Eventually, I hope to have them all posted here on his blog.  I'll start by just picking some and sharing some of the story.  I can't promise that they will be in order since they are not all in one place so I'll try to add a date from when they were taken.

This one was taken on April 8th, the day Jacob was diagnosed. He's got a little oxygen monitor on his finger and he's actually receiving his first unit of blood through a peripheral IV.  Dad took this picture with his phone and I'm so grateful that he did.  It shows so much...he really didn't look that sick, did he? It's crazy for me to look at this and think about the war that was going on inside his body...trying to kill him.

And this one was taken the very next day. From these two pictures, you can understand why Jacob said, "they made me sick!" He felt sicker after coming to the hospital than he did going in...and he's right.  The crazy thing about cancer is that they have to make you sicker in order to get you better...it just doesn't make sense.  So, in this picture you can see his new "equipment" installed into his chest.  This was right after his first surgery when they placed his central "broviac" line, did his first bone marrow aspirate and lumbar pucture.  His first dose of chemotherapy went directly into his spinal fluid.  The whole thing made him very sick, very fast and he woke up with a horrible headache that lasted for the whole month.  Initially, it was a spinal headache caused from the LP and probably an imbalance of his spinal fluid.  He had to lay down flat on his back as much as possible for the first week after that. He had four more LP's that round, so he never really got a chance to get better and the headaches were almost unbearable for him.