January 31, 2006

I am posting this early this morning since I fell asleep putting both girls to bed. Today we will be heading to Iowa City for Leah to get blood. Mondays are Leah's finger poke days at Covenant, but I could tell this weekend already that she is anemic, so instead of being poked twice, I called Iowa City and explained that since she needed blood perhaps we could just wait until today. Now that she is on the medications for her kidneys they will no longer be able to get enough blood through a finger poke and her port will need to be accessed for her Monday labs as well. This will not be good news for Leah. I did talk to a nurse last night at Covenant who knows about ports and accessing them and will work with us on how and when we need to do that. This does mean that we can get blood in Waterloo, so that is one positive aspect of this.

I am not looking forward to the drive down to Iowa City and back. We will do the same trip on Thursday, too, so it is a lot of road time. Today we will not see anyone since we are just there for a transfusion, but generally there are some doctors that walk by and check in with us.

Yesterday instead of her finger poke Leah insisted we still get a cookie from Grannie Annie's at Covenant. Since I needed to go to Target anyway we stopped there first and had a morning snack. We also went to Target where Leah found some different foods she was interested in.

Right now Leah is tired much of the time. She does not complain about it a lot, and is still interested in doing things with us, but a nap is a necessity for her. On Monday she did go back to preschool for a bit. Her class meets from 12:30 - 3 in the afternoon so I knew that this would be exhausting for her and she may not make it through the entire class. She had her regular driver, Deb, pick her up and take her - just like normal. Monday was Connor's birthday and hat day as well so she had her things laid out the night before. She did not last very long when she was there, but she thought it was good to be back and see her friends. The last time she had been at school was the day before her biopsy at the end of November. She still talks about school like everything happened just yesterday for her, and she does enjoy the different activities that school provides.

After she returned from school she took a nap, but last night she was ready to go again and went to Wal-Mart with Chris. Her big plan was that she was going to sleep with us in our bed last night. Leah has never been a good sleeper so this was like a blast from the past because she did spend many nights in our bed with us snuggling up. And, just like before, there was little room for me to sleep as I gripped the edge of the bed so I would not fall out.

This morning I was up around 6, and so was Leah the light sleeper. I tried to convince her to rest on the couch, but instead she ate breakfast: 2 pieces of cinnamon toast, a piece of provolone cheese, a piece of colby jack cheese, and some croutons.

I need to quickly get ready for our Iowa City trip. Chloe also has to get dropped off at daycare today much earlier than normal. She usually has her own agenda, so this will be interesting.

Pray for Leah's treatments to be effective, for tumor shrinkage, declining AFP numbers, and for her continued strength as she endures all these different medical procedures.