Coming up next week...

I'm only working three days next week (one of them being Sunday), because Ricky has a lot of things coming up.

First of all, both boys are off on Monday and Tuesday because of Veteran's Day. (Apparently one day is not enough anymore.) So Monday I am going to just hang with the three kids; maybe we'll do something fun together?

On Tuesday, Misty will go to day care and I'll take the boys with me up to Stanford for Ricky's quarterly CF appointment. First he'll be having his full pulmonary function test, which takes around an hour to do. We do that once a year. Then we'll have lunch followed by his actual doctor appointment. Hopefully his lungs are doing better since recovering from this virus. It really made him tired and dizzy even more than usual.

That reminds me, I want to ask the doctor about the dizziness. It's getting worse rather than better and we're really not getting any answers about it.

Side note: The new insurance we have through Healthy Families is proving to be a bit of a pain. We are going through the same things again that we have gone through with other insurances... For example, he takes Zithromax all the time, three times a week, and insurance companies don't want to give him the 12 tablets he needs per month to accomplish this (because the med is expensive). So the doctor has to write a justification letter (which they are used to doing because this med is so commonly prescribed for CF kids, to help with lung inflammation) and get it preapproved. The insurance company also don't want to pay for him to have Allegra, since he can get Claritin over the counter. So we might have to try Claritin for a while to see if it works for him, and if it doesn't (but it probably will) then we can get the insurance company to pay for Allegra. Makes sense to me, actually.

Anyway, our big adventure starts after I get off work on Thursday. At that time we will get my mom and we'll all go to San Francisco for a trip paid for by Genentech, makers of Pulmozyme, one of Ricky's meds. On this page on the Pulmozyme site you can see a testimonial by Ricky about Pulmozyme. Because we were approached to do that (early this year), their marketing/PR department contacted us a couple of months ago about doing a live, in-person photo/video testimonial about the drug -- a more in-depth thing. So they are paying for us to have a trip to San Francisco (which is an hour's drive from here) for three nights! We are arriving on Thursday afternoon and checking into the fancy-shmancy Westin St. Francis Hotel. We have two rooms -- one for my mom and Misty that is an accessible room (because my mom has some mobility issues) and one for the boys and me. On Friday morning, we have a three-hour photo session (this weekend I need to get together/buy clothes for all of us to be somewhat coordinated). Then... The rest of the time is all ours! They're putting us up in the hotel through Sunday morning, and we are free to explore the city on our own. They are paying for our meals, transportation, mileage to the city, etc. It's going to be so exciting! (Not to mention that Ricky gets a $500 honorarium for doing this -- which he says he might share with us. ;)) Guess there are certain perks to having CF, even though it sucks!

So yes, that will be our week next week. Looking forward to it!