Tough Cookie

It has been a long week for our little Brookie. Last Monday we went to see her Oncologist. He said everything was looking good and she is right on track with her treatment. I took her to the infusion room after we met with the doctor and she got her monthly dose of chemo through her port. It was amazing because it is the kind that they just "push" in rather than putting it in an IV drip at a slower pace, so it only took us about 30 minutes. I asked the nurse if that was the kind we would get the rest of this maintenance time and she said yes. It was so weird to think that we won't have those long days at the infusion room anymore. It is like we are running in to a store or running an errand - it is done so quickly. In fact, it's quicker than a trip to the store! The type of chemo she got is the kind that can make her legs ache and that made her walk on her toes in the past, so we knew that was something to watch out for. Tuesday she said that her legs were itchy before she went to school, but they looked ok and she was walking fine so we figured that was her way of describing that they were hurting, so we rubbed them and it seemed to make her feel better. Her teachers rubbed them a little bit at school too, but overall she was feeling pretty good. She had to start steroids again Monday night too. Since she is only on them for 5 days per month now, she never really gets to the super hungry stage, which is a good thing because all she wants to eat these days is salami, gogurt and candy. Suuuuper healthy! Throughout the rest of the week she would say her legs were itchy sometimes, but she played with the other kids and was acting pretty normal. Her emotions did seem to get pretty dramatic as the week progressed. She would be happy one minute and then yelling the next. It had to be either from all the drugs she is taking or maybe she had the beginning of a virus and it was making her feel bad because she would get worked up to a point that she would end up crying. When she gets to that point, I usually just hug her until she calms down. It is hard to see her get so crazy from all the medicine. We had a fun family movie night Friday night at home. It was great to just all hang out together and relax after a busy week. Saturday we had soccer games for Braden and Kayla and then Kayla went home with my parents and Braden went to Jeanne & Jack's. It was crazy for us to have just two little ones at home! Although, as Mike pointed out, we didn't have the quiet ones. :) We had friends over for dinner and played games after the girls went to bed. Brooklyn seemed especially emotional, acting happy then mad then sad. Sunday morning when she woke up she had a big rash all over her leg. She had had a couple bumps on her leg last Monday morning but they were really nothing concerning. I thought maybe she had scraped her knee or it was just a couple little random bumps and they hadn't changed all week so we didn't think much about them. However, yesterday when she woke up, it had spread all around her knee and up her thigh. We thought we would just wait and see how it acted during the day but by the evening it had gotten considerably worse. We called the on-call doctor and I sent him a picture of her leg and he thought it was strange looking but that we could wait to get it looked at until Monday morning. However, when I went in to check on her at 10:00, she had a fever of 102. We called the doctor back and knew that we had to go into to the ER. Our good friend Talacey came over to stay with the other kids and Mike and I went to the hospital. We had to stand and wait a little while until we got back into a room and Brooklyn was not feeling well because of her fever and she kept saying her rash hurt. They did a chest x-ray to rule out punomea and then did a blood draw from her port to see if she had an infection in it. New protocol also requires that she gets blood drawn from another spot to see if she has any kind of infection in her body at all, so she had to get poked in her hand but that didn't work, so they drew blood from her arm. Then the doctor tried to cut open one of her bumps to get a sample to see what exactly the rash is on her leg. She was sleeping while he did it so it didn't bother her much. Then they told us that she was going to have to get checked into the hospital until we had the results back from her labs. Mike went home so he could get the kids ready for school in the morning and Brooklyn and I got upstairs a little before 7:00am. Apparently the sample they took in the morning from her rash wasn't good enough so a doctor had to come in this afternoon to get another sample. She cut open one of the bumps on her rash and poked a stick in it to get a sample for the lab. It was really painful and Brooklyn was crying and asking the doctor to stop & not poke her with the stick again. It was so sad. She has been so brave this whole time, she has had to continually take medicine - tylenol for her fever that keeps coming back and benadryl to help with the itching and pain of the rash. She has given herself the medicine, even when she doesn't want to and luckily I brought gumdrops to reward her bravery. :) We are in isolation because they don't want to expose any of the other kids on the floor to chicken pox just in case that's what she has. It is nice because we have our own room, but a bummer because Brooklyn can't leave the room at all. They brought in some paints and an easel for her to color with today though, so that was really fun, we decorated our room with all of the beautiful paintings. They expect us to be here until at least Wednesday when we get the results back from all of her cultures. Thank you for your messages, your thoughts and prayers, especially while we are in the "hopsidal."