Avery Jo is born! :)

AVERY JO IS BORN!!

So on June 1st, little Avery Jo was finally born!! It was such an exciting day!! This little girl is honestly the cutest little girl ever! Of course I feel that way though... she's ours :) Anyway, she is now a month old tomorrow!! Time is going by for us very quickly. She was born at 4 lbs. and 12.5 oz. She now weighs 6 lbs just barely! Little Avery was born very healthily and was only sent to the NICU for about 6-7 hours! That was a huge blessing for us. She came home with us only 3 days later after she was born, which was  much better than what we expected. Here's some great pictures of her right after she was born!!

Here's some more recent pictures of her!

So everything has gone over incredibly well with little Avery Jo. She has just been a huge blessing for us and has brought a little piece of joy into this time of our lives. 

I will now explain a little bit about what is going on in our lives right now to continue updating everyone. We are right now living in West Virginia with Tommy's family so that I can be getting radiation treatment and chemotherapy from the National Institute of Health in Maryland. It's been 2 weeks since I've started it and it's going alright. It just makes me very tired from the radiation and all the medication that I'm on so that part is difficult, but it's been very helpful to have Tommy's family and my mom and dad have been here to help with little Avery, so that has helped us out a lot. Only 4 more weeks of radiation and then this part will be over! But as for now this is what we are going through and we are just trying our best to get through it! 

For everyone on that fundraiser that Meagan Jackson formed for us, I just want to say thank you so much for your contribution!! I know that it will help us so much in many ways! Good luck on your race this week ladies! I'll be cheerin you on from here!! :)

Update on our lives...

I have decided to start a blog now right before we have our little baby girl! I'm hoping that this will make it easier for everyone to be updated on what's going on in our lives! As many may know, we have had a lot going on these past couple months! I will give an update on this now so that everyone can feel included and have an idea on what's been going on!

Well it all started in the end of February/beginning of March of 2013, so only a couple months ago. Tommy and I at this time were going to school and working as much as we could. Tommy was in the middle of doing an internship at Pleasant Grove High School that he loves helping with the athletic training there! I was 26 weeks pregnant at this time and growing :) I started having weird things happen to my body that turned out to be mini seizures for about 3 weeks. I assumed for awhile that these things happening were just part of the pregnancy and it was hard for me to see that they weren't actually normal for pregnancy. (First time being pregnant... I had no idea what to be expecting!) It was even hard for me to describe to my OB what was going on because during the seizures, my brain would kinda cut out and it was hard to even understand what was going on. So finally in the end of March, I had one of the worst seizures I had had and Tommy was with me and it really scared him. We were talking to my uncle on the phone who is a doctor when this happened and afterward he said that we needed to go to the Emergency Room. So we went to the ER that day and I explained to them my symptoms and immediately the doctor knew I needed to have an MRI done. It took awhile to get that done and finally get the results back. When they came to tell us the results.. It was the weirdest thing to hear. The doctor came and told us that I had a growth in my brain, which was a brain tumor. Tommy and I were incredibly shocked. We didn't even know how to respond or how to act after that. It was something that I honestly was not expecting to hear. We were told by the neurosurgeon guy that I would be operated on the next day to take out this brain tumor. The tumor was in the frontal left lobe of my brain and we were told that there was some possibility that taking it out could mess with other parts of my brain and create personality changes or even speech changes. I didn't even know if I would ever be able to speak again after the next day. That night I even wrote a letter to our baby girl that would eventually be born because I didn't know if I would ever be able to talk to her. 

We called our families and thank goodness my family and Tommy's parents were able to come on such short of notice! The next morning they shaved my head to prepare for the surgery. This was incredibly hard for me to allow. My hair was soo long! I really still miss it a lot and won't have long hair again for a long time. But it was a sacrifice that I had to make. The surgery went better than the doctors thought it would. I can still speak and I'm told that my personality has not changed! Still Sassy Kassi is what I'm told haha What a great blessing for us that those changes did not occur! They took out as much of the tumor as they could without interfering with vital parts of my brain. The part they took out was a little smaller than a tennis ball.. holy HUGE! I couldn't believe that it had been up there and I had no idea. It was classified as being a grade 3 anaplastic astrocytoma tumor. Brain tumors can be classified on grades 1-4, grade 4 being the worst, so a grade 3 was not the best news we wanted to hear. It is cancerous and the cancer cells have spread some into the rest of my brain. This means that I now will soon be starting radiation therapy and chemotherapy. I could not do this while pregnant so we will be having our little girl early so that I can get started sooner on the treatment. She will be born on Saturday!!! June 1st and will only be 35 weeks along, but she is predicted to do well and be just fine. A week and a half after she is born, we have chosen to move out east to West Virginia and live with Tommy's family there so that I can do my 6 weeks of radiation and chemotherapy at the National Institute of Health in Maryland. This will also be a great blessing for us! There is a lot coming up in these next couple weeks for us! We are very excited for these upcoming changes! Especially to finally have our little girl with us in a couple days! I will continue to update this as much as I can and I promise to post pictures of this little girl! Thank you SO much for everything that everyone has done to support us and for all of your prayers! I know that this is helping me so much and I could not get through this by myself! 

Our sweet little girl :)