Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Annabelle Update

I know, I know, I haven't updated in a long time! A lot has happened but I'll try my best to keep it brief. Annabelle is now halfway through cycle 5 of chemo! That means only 1 more cycle and then it's local control time, which most likely means surgery and radiation. I'm certainly not excited that she has to go through that but it will be nice to see how well she has responded to the chemo so far. They will repeat all of the imaging and we will be able to see how much her tumor has shrunk. We know that it has shrunk because you can see from the outside and her pain went away after only a few days of chemo so I'm hopeful that it will be nearly gone by now! It was so hard to know the extent of the damage before because it was surrounding things and hard to image so I'm expecting that we will know a lot more and feel a lot more comfortable going into the surgery than we did when they almost did it before chemo. But that's all in the future. I haven't even mentioned the past yet...

Chemo has been about the same as before. Fever every time her counts get low, C-diff again, still no nausea from the chemo (Whoohoo!), and yummy tube food. The good news is, she only has to take Flagyl once a day so I don't have to get up and push it through her tube in the night anymore! Her feed tube clogged a few weeks ago so I had to pull it out at home. Her platelets also happened to be really low at the time. They were at 2,000 and normal is over 100,000 so I didn't feel comfortable putting the tube back in. If it were to scrape her throat she could bleed a lot very quickly because with low platelets she wouldn't be able to clot well. She was eating pretty well so she got to leave it out for a couple weeks. We did put it back in before she was discharged on Sunday though because this is the chemo that gives her bad mouth sores and she doesn't eat anything at all during that so she needs her tube food then. Really, overall things are going well.

Josh surprised the girls and came down for Layla's birthday (more to come on that later) and we all had a great time. Annabelle was feeling really good, Layla was adorable as always and life was good! The girls were already in bed when he got here, so when Annabelle woke up at 1 AM wanting a drink I told her to look in my bed. She kept saying "Who is that?" It was hilarious! Then when she realized it was her daddy she didn't want to go back to sleep!

Other things to document so I don't forget...
One evening I was driving Annabelle to the ER at PCMC because she had a fever. They always want me to go to our local ER so they can start her on antibiotics right away, but then they ALWAYS make us go in the ambulance down to PCMC. Then we don't have a car there and somebody has to bring one down and yada yada yada, it's a big hassle. So now I just put her in the car and head for SLC. (It probably makes it seem like I am risking my daughter's health just for my convenience, so judge me if you'd like!) Well I was hurrying to get her there and figured if I got pulled over they would understand. There had been construction on the interstate and I heard it was bad the last few days so I took Legacy Highway. (those of you familiar with Utah will understand this) Sure enough I got pulled over going 75 in a 55. But I wasn't putting anyone in danger, I promise! There was hardly any traffic on Legacy. As I was handing the officer my license I told him why I was speeding and he looked in the back to see my bald headed cutie whimper and start crying and handed me back my license, made sure we didn't need an ambulance and sent us on our way with instructions on the quickest way to get to PCMC! Just one of those little, very little, perks to having a kid with cancer.

After watching a video online of another cancer fighting cutie at the Make-A-Wish wishing room to place his wish I asked Annabelle what she would want to wish for. In the past she has always said Disneyland but that night she said she would wish that her Daddy could come back to Utah to visit. Broke my heart, right in two! Such a sweet girl she is.

1 comment:

Shannon said...

That is the sweetest thing! Maybe you could tell her that Daddy would get to come to Disneyland with her. Double bonus!