Phil blogged about The Serenity Foundation’s National Blogger Blood Drive (say that 5 times fast!) but I wanted to write about it as well.

Serenity received many, many blood transfusions in the early weeks of her battle with ALL. It was almost miraculous to witness how much better she would feel after receiving someone else’s blood over the course of 3 hours. While I have always had an appreciation for blood donation, seeing it save my daughter’s life & restore her vitality really brought home the importance of this.

On July 30, we will be sponsoring a blood drive in Draper, Utah. It goes from 3 pm to 8 pm and there will be food (I think), movies, and really awesome company. PLEASE if you are able, come donate blood. Here is a list of donor requirements. If you can’t donate blood I hope that you will still stop by to say hi and show your support of those of us with needles sticking out of our arms.

ARUP is the sole provider of blood to Primary Children’s Medical Center, where Serenity is treated.

They are holding several promotion this summer, so when you donate blood you could win a free car or a $50 gas card. (Someone from our group will win a gas card.)

The location of the blood drive is Twelve Horses. They are located at 13961 South Minuteman Drive, Suite 125, Draper, Utah. According to MapQuest, if you are coming from the south take the 14600 SO./UT-140 exit, EXIT 288. Turn right onto Highland Drive and left onto Minuteman Drive.

Please help us spread the word by blogging about this, or promote it on Digg, Stumble, or Twitter. Tag your entries #tsfblood. We would love to have a great turnout.

If you are not nearby but would like to organize a blood drive in your area, please let us know how we can help.

Tuesday night Serenity seemed to be in a lot of pain. She was crying and hysterical but wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. I think it was her legs hurting but I still am not positive. Finally, we gave her some oxycodone and she quickly drifted off to sleep.

Wednesday morning we had another clinic visit. She was a little crabby all morning. We had to be in Salt Lake at 8:30 a.m…..no easy feat! But we made it only ten minutes late.

There is always a little craft for her to work on while we are waiting for our turn to be seen.

We saw a doctor and a nurse practitioner we hadn’t seen before. I really liked the nurse practitioner. Serenity has been complaining about her eyes a lot. Again, I don’t know whether they itch, or hurt, or what. They haven’t been red and she can still see, but they occasionally water and she rubs them a lot. The nurse practitioner prescribed some liquid Claritin in case it’s allergies. I have really bad seasonal allergies but I don’t think that it’s that (because of the lack of redness, mostly).

Serenity was accessed via her port, like always. She screamed to high heaven, like always. It was over fairly quickly, thank goodness. They drew blood and everything came back fine. We took her down for another lumbar puncture. It took her a very long time to wake up. Maybe she was making up for last time. But she did wake up finally and it didn’t take her too long to get back to her old sweet self.

The dr told us that our next phase, Interim Maintenance, will be a little different than we had expected. The Children’s Oncology Group recently changed their recommendation so instead of oral methotrexate, they will give it intravenously. I confess I’m relieved. We have a hard enough time getting her to take her medicine. Also a friend of ours has a child with ALL and his oral chemo has really done a number on his mouth. He went nearly a week without eating anything because it was so painful. So although it means more trips up to Primary Children’s, and more gas money and time, I am glad we will be doing the chemotherapy intravenously. Apparently this is how they used to do it, then they switched to oral delivery, but about a month ago switched back after concluding that delivering intravenously lessened the risk of relapse.

So we are finishing up this Consolidation stage, then she gets a week off from clinic visits, and then we move to Interim Maintenance and I think our visits come every 10 days, rather than once a week. We are making progress!

Serenity: Daddy?

Me: Daddy is working.

Serenity: Bye bye?

Me: Yes, Daddy went bye bye to a meeting. He will snuggle you when he comes home.

Serenity: HOLD ME?!

Me: Yes, when he comes home he will hold you.

Serenity, giggling: Daddy HOLD ME!!!!

Accompanied by a huge grin.

The other day I caught my twins (3 years old) fighting over who got to hold a dead fly. You know those conversations you never thought you’d have? That’s what went through my head when I set the timer so they could each have 3 minutes to hold the fly.

When it was Indigo’s turn she started to cry and I went over to her to see what the problem was. “Taran took off the head! I don’t get a turn with the head!” She was really upset.

A few days later Taran came running excitedly into the room. “Indy!” he said. “I found you a new dead fly!”

Serenity received a gift in the mail.

Needless to say, she was thrilled.

Serenity’s Amazon Wish List does not appear to be updating, so if you’ve bought her a gift and are wondering why it’s still showing up on her site, that’s why.

My house is falling apart.

The dishwasher isn’t working. The AC isn’t working. The hot water heater is on its last leg. Not that I need it now, but the heat only works sometimes. My basement keeps flooding and we’ve had to take all of the carpet out of one room because it was ruined.

The yard is sadly neglected. The garden is dying. I look around and it’s hard not to feel depressed.

But Serenity is doing well. She is starting to walk again and she’s talking more than ever. She has taken her medicine really well the past two days. There are tantrums and mood swings, but most days she is a typical two year old girl.

I’ve been under a lot of stress. There’s no money for the things we need and no clear answers about what course of action to take. With all that we’ve been through the past two years, I’ve come to the conclusion that patience and relying on the Lord is what I’m supposed to learn. If only I was a fast learner!

I’m a worrier and a planner. I like to know ahead of time what is going to happen. It’s very hard for me to not know what is going to happen next. But no matter what plans we make, life seems to have something else in mind.

The kids are the only thing that matter really, and they’re ok. But the rest of it - all the stuff that makes up life and our experience on this planet - that is all a mess and none of it is under my control.

What do a two year old girl and a stuffed horse have in common? Both got their “ports” accessed at the clinic today. (The horse was a much easier patient.)

Serenity had her weekly visit today at the oncology clinic at Primary Children’s Hospital. Rachelle is an awesome girl at the hospital - a Child Life specialist - and each week when we visit she spends some time playing with and talking to Serenity. Today she noticed that Serenity was carrying her stuffed horse. So Rachelle took Horse through the same process Serenity goes through at each visit. First Horse got an ID band around her leg. Then Horse got her port accessed. First we cleaned her chest in 3 different steps, and then we turned on a movie for Horse and she sat very still while Rachelle put the needle into Horse’s chest. Then she taped the needle in place and Phil carefully pretended to give Horse her IV medicine. Horse watched the movie part of the time, and sometimes she watched the IV. Then Rachelle went through the steps of taking of Horse’s chest bandage off and taking the needle out. When it was all done she praised Horse for holding so still and being such a brave patient.

Then it was Serenity’s turn.

It doesn’t get any easier, even though we’ve been doing this regularly now. We hold Serenity down and talk to her to try and soothe her while the nurse cleans her chest and places the needle. Serenity screams bloody murder the entire time, begging us to stop. It breaks my heart. We numb her chest ahead of time, so I think it is fear more than pain, and somehow that makes it even harder to watch.

Once the line is placed and her clothes are back in place, she does calm down quickly. Today she had a blood draw and then we were off to the Rapid Treatment Unit for another lumbar puncture.

Normally it takes 30 minutes or more before she wakes up and they bring us into the recovery room. Today Phil had an errand to run and I went to talk to someone in the billing department. 10 minutes later I was heading back to the RTU when I heard a page for Serenity’s parents. My heart sank to my stomach. As it turned out, she had awakened very quickly and when we weren’t there she was frantic. I raced back to recovery and she was yelling Mommy! in such a sad angry voice that it hurt my heart. I was able to calm her quickly and settle her down and within a few minutes she was sitting up and smiling again.

Serenity turned two on Sunday and we had a little party for her at Phil’s parents’ house Monday night. She loves to tell us, “I two!”

We are still having the hardest time getting her to take her oral medication. Her side effects have been very minimal this month and so she is taking way less medicine than she was last month. But she is fighting it fiercely. We end up dosing her two or three times because she spits so much of it out immediately. I keep hoping that she will adapt and this will get easier, because we’ll be doing this for 2 1/2 years. But so far it’s getting harder, not easier.

Thanks to everyone for your well wishes and support. We really feel blessed and supported by all our friends, including the ones we’ve never met.

The first week of consolidation has been easier than induction was. Monday Serenity’s numbers were good and she didn’t need any transfusions. She went under general anesthesia for a lumbar puncture and they put chemotherapy into her spinal fluid. She took a little bit longer than normal to wake up and get back to normal but before long she was feeling pretty good. She is such a happy girl.

We also started her on a new oral chemotherapy medication on Monday, 6MP. She took hardly anything last week, and getting her to take meds again has been a real challenge. She is spitting everything out! We have tried all the tricks. We flavor it, we put it in a syringe, we hold her down, and no matter how well we orchestrate it, she has managed to spit almost everything out (and most of it into Phil’s face!). I have been really worried because it’s so important that she get this medicine, and very important that the dosing is accurate.

Today was a success because Phil added it to an egg he was cooking & she ate the whole egg without complaint. BUT the medicine is supposed to be taken on an empty stomach, and we don’t know if it can be heated like that. So tomorrow we’ll try it with grape flavoring, and hope that it does the trick. (As a result of Serenity getting leukemia, I’ve made a wonderful & thoughtful new friend - nearby even! - who not only brought us dinner Monday night but also gave me some grape flavoring to try. So there are a few silver linings.)

Serenity has been shedding like crazy the past week or two, but between Monday and Wednesday she lost more than half of her hair. I was hoping to hold off on shaving her head until we got our family photos done this weekend, but by Wednesday I conceded that she was looking pretty raggedy and was probably worse off than if we just shaved it. So we did, and I struggled not to cry. She is adorable, but she looks so sick now. And she always had such beautiful long hair for her age.

This was taken in April:

(Yes, ignore the straps of her carseat please. She’s a little Houdini.)

In May, in the hospital:

And yesterday, at Ikea:

(The sticker on her head was her idea. She loves her bald head.)

This has been our week “off”, and it’s been nice. Off meaning that Serenity is only taking Prevacid and Nystatin. She has been a joy to be around. She laughs a lot, she plays silly jokes on us, and she has started trying to stand up. She can’t stand for more than a second or two, but she has started crawling again so she can move around of her own volition now, which makes her happy. Instead of sitting on the bed in the front room all the time, sometimes she will slide off and scoot around to interact with the twins, or to get a specific object. We are hopeful that she will be walking again soon. (And I am hoping that this month’s chemo doesn’t cause her legs to start hurting again.)

She is losing a lot of hair. You can see her scalp now and it reminds me of a little old man. She still has enough hair that I am reluctant to shave it, but she is shedding everywhere. I suspect that all of the hair is dead, and it just hasn’t all fallen out yet. Anytime we run our fingers through her hair we come away with a lot of hair that has fallen out. Whenever she is upset she grabs fistfuls of hair, which is distressing to me. I know it doesn’t hurt her (because of how much I can get without having to pull hard at all) but it still seems so unnatural. We have family photos scheduled this week and after that we will talk some more about shaving her head. I am hesitant to do it until she has more scalp showing than hair, but it would make the hair mess that is everywhere easier to control.

Serenity was supposed to have a blood draw today from Home Health care. The hospital told us last week that they would set that up. We have an appointment at the clinic tomorrow morning, so the hospital told us to call before we came up to make sure that her numbers were high enough that we could proceed with the next stage of treatment.

On Friday I phoned Home Health just to make sure that the blood draw had been ordered. The person I spoke with told me that we were scheduled for July 6, but nothing had been set up for June 30. She advised me to call the hospital and have the doctor call with orders for the blood draw. I called the clinic and explained the situation and the person I spoke with told me that he would give the information to a nurse. Phil called Home Health Friday afternoon and the person he spoke with said that no one from the hospital had called with orders for the draw. She said they had called the hospital themselves and asked that the oncologist on call call them back but no one had done it. She went on to say that it wouldn’t do any good to draw the blood on Sunday because the lab was not open over the weekend, so there would be no results by Monday morning.

Our plan is to go up to the hospital 30-60 minutes early on Monday and explain the situation, and have them draw the blood there. Serenity is scheduled for a spinal tap with intrathecal (in her spine) chemotherapy. Then we will go home with oral chemo that she will take twice a day at home.

I have been reading some articles about the oral chemo she is supposed to take. Some hospitals are testing for a specific protein in the blood before administering the oral chemotherapy, in case the dose needs to be adjusted. I plan to ask our doctor about that, but I don’t know whether they will agree to it. It’s a weird situation to be in. Phil and I are reading as much as possible in order to understand Serenity’s leukemia, and the tests and treatments that go along with it. I wonder how her doctors feel about being questioned or even told that we think they should do their job a particular way. Of course I am confident that her doctors know what they are doing, and that they are working hard to cure her cancer, but I also know that it is possible for a doctor to not know everything in their field. I belong to a email list comprised of parents whose children have ALL. I have learned so much from just a few weeks on the list about the variation in treatment protocol in different parts of the country. There is not just one way to treat her cancer, and while we are following the most common protocol, there are differences in almost everything depending on the facility or even the physician.

I look forward to Mondays because I get to spend so much time with Serenity and with Phil, giving her all of our attention. At the same time Mondays are difficult because there is a lot of crying (screaming) on her part, and it is a long day for all of us.

The yeast is really bad. She’s on Nystatin, I’m on Diflucan + Culturelle + another probiotic + grapefruit seed extract and it’s still not gone. Nursing hurts. I am at my wits end.