One Move At A Time

Angelica is an AMAZING Monopoly player. If you have any doubts, you should challenge her to a game and unless you have some serious mad skills…..she will whoop your butt. She routinely wins around here and really it shouldn’t even be considered winning as it’s more like “slaughtering” whoever she is playing against.

We’re playing a little too much Monopoly this summer….and I’m not the hugest fan of the game.

She’s been feeling pretty crappy and I’m cautiously optimistic that she’s turned/turning the corner and is slowly feeling better.

Her temperature’s have been just on the border of heading in the wrong direction and that in and of itself is a HUGE stressor on Jon and I.

We end up wondering if it’s the start of an infection or if it’s just a random high-ish temperature or if she’s fighting off something…..the what if’s are brutal.

We have been instructed to take her temperature in the morning when she wakes and in the evening before bed. So we take the evening temperature on Monday night and it reads in at a 37.6F. Her temps are normally around 36.6F and so this is a whole degree up. So we send her to bed, pack some bags (just in case a midnight run is necessary), pick up the house, throw on some laundry and try to tidy up any loose ends that we can, in case she ends up in the hospital.

Just before we go to bed, we re-do the temperature and it’s now up to 37.8F so it appears to be up…now what? which way is it headed, who knows? At this point, the baby wakes up and we’re up for an extra half an hour soothing him back to sleep. We set the alarm clock for 2 hours from now to check her again, to see which way her temps are going and just as we lay down, Josiah comes wandering into our room crying about something. At this point, you gotta just laugh…or cry and well, laughing seems like a good idea, no?

So, we get Siah back to sleep and just as we’re drifting off…..

The ALARM GOES OFF! Yah!

Go and check her temp and it’s down at 37.6F. Check it again in another 2 hours and it’s down to 37.4, in another 2 hours it’s at 37.2 and at this point it’s only a bit more until it’s time to wake up…..and so we wake up exhausted.

Factor in another 1 or 2 night time feeds and one more crying 3 year old and possibly a toilet trip or two and you pretty much have our nights right now. It’s exhausting just typing and re-reading it right now.

A couple of nights in a row like this and we’re feeling a bit run down, both emotionally and physically.

Again, it’s the not knowing that’s brutal…..

Geli’s also been feeling so crappy and we can’t pinpoint why? Could be the regular crappy effects from the chemo. It could be a virus. It could be the start of some infection and yet last week we ruled out infection, so unless something else new is starting….we’re not exactly sure WHY she’s continuing to barf and not eat and not drink.

Today has been a better day than yesterday and yesterday was better than the day before, but that’s not really saying much.

To explain that, she managed to keep down about 200mls of water yesterday. Everything else she barfed up….. She should be drinking about 2 Litres a day which is 2,000mls of water. She managed to keep down her lunch, the second time around and eat a decent dinner but it all came back up….then she ate a quarter of an apple.

I stress about how she can possibly heal and grow and get better when she’s not eating or drinking and then today she’s managed to drink 1 Litre so far and had a piece of toast, a hot dog (gross, but she wanted it) and some Chicken Veggie Soup. She’s working on her next 500mls (half a litre) and we’ve added some electrolytes to it hoping that will also help.

She is feeling better today…..and we’re left not knowing if she’s just a little more hydrated and if that’s making the difference or is it was viral and she’s slowly getting better or another possibility to throw into the mix is that she’s has WICKED amounts of stomach acid and she’s been put back on a prescription strength antacid and after almost 3 days on that…it’s starting to make a difference in the amount of pain that she’s been in (in her stomach – no heartburn, just pain in the pit of her stomach).

So……are we on the mend? We sure hope so because she’s scheduled to carry on with the second half of this current phase of treatment, next Tuesday…..if her counts are good. Which, as of Monday (two days ago) they were not. They were WAY DOWN and once again, she is at a serious risk for infection.

But, we continue to move forward, one step at a time and we trust we will get through this….it’s not easy and we’re really tired but we’re carrying on! And that’s really all we can do!