Naaman's Journal

As if we needed another reason to be grateful Naaman doesn’t need a feeding pump or nebulizer anymore… the hurricane knocked out our power for six days. The roads were blocked by down trees, poles, and power lines, so we were physically trapped on our street. When push comes to shove, our neighborhood was pretty creative at finding ways to get ice and gas (i.e. traversing the woods to a main road) and Mama’s bike

Chief Johnson Reporting for duty The Meriden Police Department put their trust in a new chief (for the day)! Naaman and Nadine met many of the officers and leadership from MPD during the parade that Make-A-Wish held for him a few months ago. MPD decided to hold their own special day for him, a big surprise for all of us. Honorary Chief Naaman Johnson took his oath and gave out his first orders! Detective Nadine

Where’s Lil Cap? Here’s Lil Cap! Today, July 25, marks two years ago that Naaman was diagnosed with A.L.L.  July is an emotional month, and we certainly can’t throw a party for this.  Nonetheless, it’s another chance to be grateful for how far Cheeky has come. In fact, last summer on this date, he was just getting discharged from the hospital! He was not happy I called him “Lil Cap:” – he said, “I Steve

We hope you are home celebrating (or will be off work soon).  We are so grateful for many things, and being home and healthy-ish for this July 4th is awesome! Wolverine pose Check out Cheeky’s summer haircut! Clinic this week was not very pleasant, but the bottomline is that his liver enzymes are looking safe and chemo will continue for now.  No doses increased, just to be careful.   Happy Independence Day, Team Naaman!

Hello, Team Naaman. Hope you are keeping cool. It’s a bit of a muggy heat wave here and we are grateful for central air to escape when we need! Cheeky loves to be outside, but tends to be hot (or cold) when it doesn’t make sense to us.  Don’t be surprised if you spot him on an 80 degree day in a long-sleeve shirt! Last Wednesday, he went to clinic to check his liver enzymes,

Little Cheeky doubled down on appointments today. This morning he had a blood draw at the Yale collection location close to our house, which was a great time-saver, but the counts came back within a few hours showing his liver enzymes were continuing to rise quite high.  In addition, he’s been quite  an aggressive beast, highly irritable, and sleeping more.  The team wanted to see him to test for a few more viruses and to

Counts (for chemo) were all good to start! The gang’s all here, waiting for Naaman to wake up! Naaman fared better fasting than we imagined (Amen) but had low blood sugar when we got to clinic.  He got some sugars to boost him up and all other counts needed looked good (ANC, hemoglobin, platelets).  As always, he needed oxygen during the LP.  His daily inhaler is helping, though, because he had less trouble breathing than

He can have all the snacks he wants after that! Poor little bud had his third (or fourth, I lost track) COVID test today at a drive-through testing site in New Haven. It’s never good but he was particularly angry at this one.  He called the nurse a “stupid blockhead” which is about the nastiest thing he knows how to say, so you know he was mad! He got to watch Bambi on the tablet,