Birthdays and stuff

Lest you all believe I have been completely caught up in my own angst the past few weeks, I have not been unaware of a few birthdays that have passed by. I am just a jerk and forget to acknowledge them in my letters.
So, Eva, I hope you had a great birthday! You are now a Mia Maid! If you were in my ward that means you would be in our giggliest, silliest, noisiest class of Young Women. You might think the Beehives would be gigglier and sillier, but this is not so. It stinks that you had finals the week after your birthday weekend. I hope you had some fun and didn't only study. Fourteen was a good year for me. It was my freshman year in high school and overall it was a pretty good year.
Abe, now you are 19!! I don't remember my 19th birthday at all, sorry. I know I was beginning my sophomore year at Rice. It would have been the very beginning of the semester, and I don't remember if I did anything or if anyone really knew it was my birthday. Probably my friends did, I just don't remember. Most of that year was pretty rough on me. But I met Ben when I was 19, decided to transfer to BYU when I was 19, and overall, at least the end of 19 was very good for me. I was thinking of you on the 2nd. It's good to have a birthday on Saturday if it is during the school year. Did you wear the T-shirt Eva sent you?! :-)
I also have been thinking a lot about President Hinckley over the past week as many people have, I'm sure. I have a feeling that has also added to my emotionalism this week. I am so happy for him, but I'll miss him so much as well. I'm old enough to have very clear memories of President Kimball, President Benson was "my prophet" for most of my growing-up years, and of course I remember President Hunter, but he wasn't prophet for very long. President Hinckley definitely connected with me best of all the prophets in my lifetime.
I really loved him. He had the perfect mix of humor and solemnity. I felt like he could really challenge us to be better, but did so in such an encouraging way that you couldn't really feel defensive about anything he said. He made me laugh at least once in every talk. And his energy and optimism were totally unmatched, in my opinion. He was amazing and I will sure miss seeing him at General Conference. It seems like he was the guy who conducted GC for years and years and years. His face is inextricably connected with GC in my mind.
Although this happened just in the last General Conference, I will always think of him "knighting" President Eyring with his cane as just being quintessential President Hinckley. He made carrying a cane almost seem cool.
I watched the funeral on Saturday and it was very sweet. I cried during the slideshow set to that beautiful song "My Shepherd Will Supply My Need." I've had the hardest time singing that song without crying, so to have the slideshow superimposed onto that song was really, really touching to me.
It's hard to imagine having another prophet, but I guess it's like having another child. You can't really imagine it until it happens, and then it seems like it was meant to be all along. But I will really miss him.
My boys and husband are doing well. Brigham lost another tooth Sunday morning, one of his bottom teeth. He's now lost all four of his bottom middle teeth. He was actually really happy about this tooth because it is one Joseph actually hasn't lost yet! The morning then took a negative turn for Brigham, though, because he couldn't find his Sunday shoes. Now Brigham loves to get all spiffed up for church. He had given me one of his church shoes earlier in the week for me to polish for him, because it had a few scuff marks. But then Sunday morning he couldn't find the other one. He was so sad! He cried and cried at the prospect of having to wear his dingy old school shoes. But somehow he survived.
Brigham has the hardest time with his shoes. I have a "shoe box" out in the garage where the boys are always supposed to put their shoes. They come home with gallons of sand in their shoes from the school playground, so I try to make sure they take their shoes off in the garage and put them straight in the shoe box. But still, Brigham manages to misplace his shoes at least twice a week. He actually lost his school shoes for almost two weeks, and I went to Payless and bought some new ones. Of course that very afternoon he found his shoes (outside, where I had told him several times to look), and Joseph showed me his shoes which had a hole in the toes. So Joseph ended up with the new shoes.
Ok, enough for tonight. I didn't get any steroid treatments this week. I told you all last week that I was suffering from a bad cold, right? Well, sickness always exacerbates MS symptoms, and I started to feel a little better by Wednesday when my cold started abating. And I never did get a call back from my doctor here about what he and the Houston neuro decided. But today has been bad on my legs. I think I overdid it yesterday, so maybe I'm just paying for it today. We'll see how tomorrow goes. I wish the steroids weren't so yucky so that the decision to do another round of treatment wouldnt' be so hard.
Dr. Tallman had me start back up on Rebif at the beginning of last month, as a "just-in-case" measure while I'm gearing up for the bone marrow transplant. Boy, I hate Rebif. I'm not even up to the full dose yet (although I'll start up on the full dose this week). The shots sting really bad going in, and you have to rotate your injection site for each shot, and 2 of the 4 acceptable sites are on my legs. Now, you might think that my legs would be a good place for shots, since they're mostly numb anyway, right? Not really, though. I have what's called "clonus" in both my legs. Basically it's hyperreflexivity, and causes my legs to jerk involuntarily periodically. The clonus is triggered by any weird sensation in my legs-- itching, getting poked, whatever. So the shots make my legs jerk really, really bad. When I do the injection, I'm supposed to leave the needle in place for 10 seconds to make sure all the medicine is injected. Well, try to keep a needle in place while your legs are jerking uncontrollably!! It's not easy, and it really hurts because it makes the needle dig all around in my leg. Copaxone didn't do that, because the medicine didn't sting going in. Copaxone caused quite a bit of soreness in the injection site after the fact, and Rebif doesn't, so I guess that's good, but I don't know how to do the shots without making my legs to crazy. And I hate the Rebif because it makes me crazy. Irritable and grumpy (yeah, that's probably had something to do with my discontent this week as well) and just not like myself. Ask Ben, he'll vouch for that. AND I really think it's pointless. It didn't work last time, and Rebif has never been shown to be effective for any form of MS besides RRMS, so I'm going through all this misery for nothing. And I know once I hit the full dosage this week, all the flu symptoms will return. That's what was really the kicker for me last time, feeling like I had the flu constantly-- fever, body aches, the whole nine yards.
Ok, that is quite enough moaning and groaning for one night.