Brinley was pretty happy today. We got a lot of smiles and the nurses finally got to see her real personality. It was nice. It was pretty quiet for her and I think she enjoyed not being bugged every hour for some test. We got a little education on how to care for her central line at home, changing the dressing and making sure it doesn't get an infection. The nurse demonstrated and it made me woozy. I had to sit down, I don't have a strong stomach for that stuff, especially pregnant!

In the afternoon they said she would need a blood transfusion. That sounded scary to me but the doctors were very reassuring that it was not a huge deal and it would be the first of several probably. She had been really pale all day, and the transfusion brought some color back to her face. she also seemed to have a little more energy. I guess the chemo kills all immature cells, leukemic or not (all leukemic cells are immature, they never mature and die, so they just keep splitting and splitting and crowd out the other normal cells) so a lot of her red blood cells were killed from the chemo. The transfusion put those cells back.

The night was pretty bad, though. For some reason they don't know, her heart rate dropped really low while she was sleeping. Her normal heartrate since we have been here has been about 110, and she was down to the 40's at times. So at 2AM she had to get an EKG where they put all the wires on your chest to check your heart. She was so mad, she screamed and screamed. She hadn't had her pain meds because she had been sleeping, so it seemed like it was hurting her. They gave her the medication and after 10 minutes or so she finally calmed down enough to get the reading. That came back fine, so they just kept an eye on her the rest of the night. Every time her heartrate would be below 50, the machine would start beeping, and I would jump out of bed and watch the monitor. The nurse kept coming in and trying to wake her up a bit because that would make her heartrate go back up. It was a long night. I finally called David at 6 to come in with me. Once she woke up in the morning, her heartrate went back to normal and she has been fine ever since. So we'll see how tonight goes.

Toys!!!

Nurse Emily... She was the best!

Ok... so this is her central line. We have to change that dressing every week.