Day 6 - Busy Blaines (in TN)

Saturday, March 16, 2013

Ellie has decided that she isn't going to sleep much at night. I went to bed shortly after 1 and at that time she was laying in bed awake. You couldn't help but kiss on her (she was smiling at me)! I fell asleep, I'm not really sure about her though. She woke me up on many occasions between then and 5 a.m. At one point I started to play with her without looking at the clock, you thought I would have learned from our last experience with the TV. Once I looked at the clock it was 3:20 and I said goodnight Ellie... go to sleep! She screamed...and screamed... I slept. By the time my alarm went off at 530 she was asleep, but I HAD to get up, we had an early start for the day. I let her sleep as long as I could before I woke her up and stuck her in the tub real quick. We did Face-time with mom and Noah while in the tub, then we rushed out...

Fri, if you remember, Ellie was getting her port. We checked in at the front desk and headed over the the Chili center. It wasn't long (3 seconds to be exact) before Ellie had someone wrapped around her finger. Then another, and another, and another. Practically everyone except the doctor who was doing her procedure was playing with her at some point. That's o.k. he should be focusing on other things. :) .. Once she was sedated, which was easier to handle this time than last, I was rushing off to my donor apt. which I was already 30 mins late for.

I appreciated that everyone in the blood donor room took my time constraints seriously. I only had until 11a until Ellie was supposed to be in the recovery room. Dr. Wright met me in the donor room and as I was being stuck with a needle we went over the consent forms for the upcoming chemo treatment.

There wasn't much new info there that we hadn't covered in our previous conversation. The biggest difference just that Ellie will go into the hospital Sunday night instead of Monday. She has to get a lot of fluids in her before the first med so she will go at 8p.m. Sunday night so she get most of her fluids while she is sleeping. No later than I finished my bloodwork and signed my release I got the phone call saying Ellie was now in the recovery room. Perfect timing, I was on my way.

Ellie woke up fairly quick from the anesthesia and was eating her cookies in no-time. Her procedure went fine, all you can see at the moment is the bandage that covers it. It's on the right side of her chest just about under her collar bone area. I didn't hear anything back about the results from her hearing test. I'm going to go with no news is good news right now. We grabbed a quick bite to eat and headed to the triage for Ellie's blood work. As we Got there we found out they were running behind...an hour behind. Glad to know I crammed all that food down my throat to Just sit back and wait. Finally, our time came. It's funny how the nurses are always shocked when Ellie doesn't budge when she's stuck with the needle.

EKG followed and everything was fine. They were not looking for anything, just getting some base line information before her chemo starts.

Once we were out of there we headed back over to see our doctor just so she could look at Ellie's port before we were done for the day. Everything checked out good and we were off.

Finally, we could check out this 72 degree weather we had been anticipating all week.

Back to our room we went. Ellie was asleep in two minutes and now I'm trying to plan our escape for adventure on Saturday.

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Among many, one family I met here is the Morris's. Elijah Morris, who goes by Regen, is a 12 yr old boy with Anaplastic Astrocytoma. I haven't looked that up but the family told me that he has tumor covering approx. 80 to 90 percent of his brain. I was humbled immediately. As I sat next to Ellie who was laughing and talking, he was in a specialized chair and was essentially immobilized. Regen was diagnosed in Nov and his symptoms happened almost overnight and they've been hospitalized since. Please pray for this boy and appreciate what a blessing it is to have our girl in the condition she is in ( and while you're at it appreciate your condition as well). His Facebook page is called 'Rootin for Regen'.