Good News

Forgive me, I've been a little slow to add the latest updates.  It's harder to jump on the computer and blog when you have two children to watch, and neither of them are stuck in a hospital bed!  Just wait until I have more.  I'm sure you won't hear from me at all then.  Ha!

We had a pretty good weekend, probably better than I expected.  Kaelyn again has handled the pain pretty well.  She is very protective of her stomach area and takes things pretty slow still.  She occasionally says "owie" when she bends the wrong way or is hit or bumped.  The past several days Kaelyn has usually taken a dose or two of Tylenol.  She agrees to take this because we call it "bubble gum."  It is bubble gum flavored chew tabs, made by Equate.  Brilliant.  Even I think they taste good!

The weekend seemed pretty long, especially considering the fact that we were awaiting some potentially scary pathology reports.  Gratefully, though, we heard back on Monday, 2 days earlier than we expected to hear back.  Dr. Jensen, the oncologist at Primary's, called me Monday afternoon to discuss the results.  I was overjoyed to hear the results came back as a standard Wilm's tumor, Stage 2.  Awesome!  The pathologist in Houston was able to verify that it was just Wilm's, as opposed to teratoid Wilm's.  The technical name is a nephroblastoma, and, in layman's terms, blastoma pretty much refers to cells that look irregular and not necessarily all alike.  Does that make sense?  So they thought there was a possibility that some cells looked like bowel tissue, but the expert in Houston, who has seen many nephroblastomas, was able to confirm standard Wilm's because she has seen many similar cases to Kaelyn's.  Such a relief!  So, this means we can return to Billings and take care of Kaelyn's chemotherapy there.  We still have a lot of information to discuss with the pediatric oncologist, but we do know Kaelyn will be able to be on a pretty mild regimen of chemotherapy, and for only 5 months as opposed to the expected 6 months.  We still are not sure of the potential side effects of her medication.  We will probably be starting her chemotherapy within the next week.

Although I have truly enjoyed spending time in Morgan and having the support of family and the friends I grew up with, I look forward to returning home to Billings and being able to control my own environment again, somewhat!  Mainly bedtime / nap time routines and meals.  I always feel a little frazzled living out of a suitcase.  Also, my parents can hopefully get back to focusing on their busy lives.  They have been an amazing help and support to us, as well as  my sisters driving to Morgan to help take care of Isaac.  In fact, my sister Raegen even changed one of Isaac's poopy diapers.  She should surely chalk that up as an accomplishment.  

 Visiting Great Grandma Durrant's neighbors bunnies

 Throwing rocks in the river.

 So, right now we are 3 hours into our trip home.  We stopped to rest in Rexburg so we wouldn't have to take one excessively long trip because we did not know how Kaelyn would do in her car seat with her incision still sore.  She did really well today, though, and didn't complain of pain until we got out of the car.  She spent a good hour of the trip singing "Row, Row, Row your Boat" to us on the way.  It was entertaining.  Isaac spent the majority of the trip either eating or crying for more food.

I'm excited/nervous/not at all excited to get started with chemo.  I still do not know what to expect, but I just want to get it over with.  I know Kaelyn is going to do great though.  She continues to surprise me with her strength on a daily basis.  I'm not saying she doesn't milk this situation a bit and get a few extra treats here and there ;) But hey, that just shows me she's smart too.

I'll update in a couple of days when we've learned more about her chemotherapy and when we will be starting.