what a year :)

mark and i got to take a much needed vacation to mexico last week. we had originally booked this trip last year for our 5th wedding anniversary and my 30th bday, but mark ended up getting admitted to the hospital and getting diagnosed with sarcoidosis the week before we were supposed to go. we cancelled the trip in hopes that mark's health would greatly improve and we could rebook the following year.

we had no idea what our year was going to look like with mark's new disease. it is crazy to me it has been exactly a year today that mark had surgery. a year ago today the oncologist came to our room and said the preliminary pathology looked like lymphoma, he said there was a small chance it was something else but he was pretty sure we would be starting chemo within a week. we got into contact with support people at rocky mountain cancer center and booked our first appointment with dr jotte to plan marks chemo treatment schedule for the following tues. we ended up getting phone call on sat mid day that it came back sarcoidosis a rare autoimmune disease. we were really not sure what that had meant for us. we did a lot of research and talked with some specialists to figure out what that meant for our lives. we soon got in touch with national jewish hospital and mark got accepted into a research program there. for the next 12 months we spend a lot of time at national jewish getting LOTS of testing. we were thrilled to find that mark's sarcoid was localized for now only in his lungs. the masses in his lungs were large, but all his pulmonary function tests came back pretty good! God is soo good! the doctors told us to expect 2-3 years for mark to go into remission and then they didn't know if and for how long he would stay in remission...maybe 5 days maybe forever! even though last year was hard...it is amazing to see how much healing God has done in mark's body. last year this time he was SOOO sick. he could barely make it though the day. he was not able to help at all with the kids or chores around the house. God gave us amazing people who helped us and walked us through it all! and 1 year later mark is doing WONDERFUL! despite some annoying symptoms that now feel almost normal to mark i would say we are sooo close to remission! so since mark was doing sooo well....we REBOOKED our vacation! we celebrated the 1 year of mark going into the hospital from the beach of mexico! it was AMAZING! we are so thankful for so many things! we truly feel that this journey has brought us closer to God and strengthened our marriage. we feel it really was a blessing!

here are some fun pictures from our trip....as you can see we did a lot of NOTHING :)

we enjoyed the sun, enjoyed many yummy drinks and over all just enjoyed each other!