New Year's Day

We can check off another day on our calendar as one we were able to spend at home. Leah still seems to be feeling much better after this round of chemotherapy than she did after the first one. There has been no vomiting since we stopped the dexamethazone and she has talked constantly the entire time we have been home-very much like her normal self. She did not sound very thrilled to know we would have to go to Iowa City again on Thursday. I have started talking about these trips a few days ahead of time so that there are no big surprises and she knows generally what to expect. That is how Leah has always been with everything, so preparing her for upcoming things is not a change. I would not say she did a good job of eating today, but she did manage to eat 2 small Reeses peanut butter cups, half a piece of bread, much of the spaghetti portion of a Kids Cuisine meal, one M&M, a chicken nugget, and a restaurant packet of sour cream, along with 3 cups of whole milk. That is better than yesterday, and we hope tomorrow she will do even better than this. She requested I make the chicken stuff that Nolan's mom makes in the crockpot, so I will dig out my friend Kristin's recipe tomorrow morning. This comment is the first she has made about something actually sounding good.

She also made another comment that makes both Chris and I think a bit, and wish she would have been able to verballize this a few months ago. She commented tonight that when she was three her babysitter helped her in the bathroom, but when she turned four she had to start doing things herself -one of those things being pulling her own pants and underwear up. She told me that she did not think she could go back to daycare because she always had to do that there and it hurt her so much to bend over like that. Hmmmm......if only we had known or noticed. Yet we can clearly see that her tummy grew so rapidly, even from Halloween and Chloe's birthday to when I took her in before Thanksgiving, that this discomfort may not have been occurring for long.

On a funnier note, tonight Chris was asking me the name of the nurse who told Leah that b-r-a-s were called "b-o-o-b c-u-p-s." He spelled the entire conversation out to me since this is nothing we need Leah to know about. She promptly responds with "boob cups! I can spell, you know!" I am not sure exactly how she figured it out, but it is certainly impossible to pull anything over on her. (My mom also knows how hard it is to trick her. She put a spoonful of Ensure in Leah's milk to give her some more calories. One sip was all it took for her to know something was amiss, "It tastes like lemons." A brand new cup of milk had to be poured.)

Our other "normal people" activity of the day was visiting the Janesville Library. I work there so I have a key and that way we were able to check out another stack of books to look at.

Chris and I are spending another evening working on a jigsaw puzzle. This seems to be a good activity for us when we are stressed out or bored. There is not a good place in our house to have this set up, since the card table takes up a good chunk of the girls' play area, but that is the only location we have. We started the puzzle last night with my brother and sister-in-law, and it is rather addictive.

Leah's next treatment (aside from the weekly Vincristine treatment) is scheduled for January 17. A CT scan is scheduled for January 23 to check the tumor's size. They are already planning on at least four rounds of chemotherapy, but want to check it to make sure it is shrinking. The time frame for much of her treatment is subject to change a bit because of her blood counts, tumor size and changes, and other variables. After they think the tumor has shrunk enough they plan to resect her liver and take the tumor and a portion of her liver out. They can take as much as 50% of her liver if needed since the liver is an organ that regenerates. Obviously, the less they feel the need to remove, the better. There are many different scenarios that could play out. The best one would be that the tumor shrank enough to make resection possible, and the worst is that she may need a liver transplant. In any event the tumor needs to shrink a great deal before they attempt to remove it since it is so large removing it at it's current size would be very risky. If they are able to resect it (which is their plan at this point) they then will start more chemotherapy in an attempt to make sure that all the cancer cells have been destroyed. To us, this means that we have just started this long journey to restore Leah's health. It also means we will need your prayers for many, many months.

Please remember Leah in your prayers each day, especially as the date of her CT scan is fast approaching and we are hopeful for positive news-that the tumor is shrinking quickly.