panda belly and cooking hat

Olive had her third treatment on Monday and had two nights and a day of nausea and discomfort... seems to be coming out of it now. The cancer is making her anemic. They're treating as aggressively as they can... but the treatment will kill her if she gets too anemic (and getting more anemic is an indication that the cancer is REALLY aggressive). So based on her blood results this coming Monday and the following one, we'll know if the treatment has been strong enough to stop the cancer from driving her to anemia. Pic of her panda belly (they shaved it to do an ultrasound to look at her kidneys. It is SO soft and she lets us rub it.

We're hoping for a white Christmas our first year in the new house but it doesn't look like it will be so unless "flurries" in Denver tomorrow mean inches where we are.

On Sunday I did some sewing - made mittens for my sis out of an old wool sweater. I'm pretty proud of them; they're fleece-lined! And I also made a pink hibiscus print "cooking hat" and matching apron for Lila - no pictures now but asked Lauri to send them to me when she has them (along with pics of Lila in the monkey costume I made her for Halloween). Here's one of Lila in November in her friend Foster's "cooking hat" (and monster pajamas - perfect combo) which is what got me thinking about making her her own.

rollercoasters

Olive started eating pretty regularly Friday night, Saturday and Sunday. Since her second treatment on Monday she seems to have slowed down just a bit but is exhibiting none of the nausea and upset that she was last week yet - knock on wood. Her belly was shaved for an ultrasound while she was in the hospital and it is SO soft. Jesse leaves food on his bedstand for her at night, and when he hears crunching he reaches over to feel the belly. If the cat whines, it's not Olive (it's Casey - he doesn't like to have his belly touched); he gets shooed away from the food. If the belly feels like velvet, it's Olive and she gets to continue crunching away.

Luna won't play fetch with Jesse anymore... seems to be scarred from the tennis ball to eye incident. Since she isn't expending her insane energy daily playing fetch, she's driving us a little insane.

I can't believe that Christmas is next week. Sounds like all my siblings will be in the Midwest but I can't go! Oh well, Jesse and I will have fun with his parents in Colorado - and it will be neat to have our first Christmas in our new house. Since Christopher the Charlie Brown Christmas tree died last spring, we had to get a new tree. It's a little blue spruce (little!) that we named Treena and she's stiff enough to hold ornaments and lights (which is more than Christopher could do for several years - not that that made him any less of a tree). She's on a stool in the dining room and so far the cats aren't eating her needles (which are sharp) and barfing them up all over the house like they used to do with Christopher. It's the little joys, right?

Oh, and no belly pics of me yet but these are awesomely bad!

lymphoma

Olive is home now. We found out Monday that she has high-grade lymphoma of the kidneys. The last time they checked her blood (Tuesday morning) it looked like her kidneys were functioning near-normal - the failure indicators stopped falling on Monday. Monday night the hospital gave her the first chemo treatment - a shot - and she's been fighting nausea and not really eating since. Yesterday was better than Wednesday and hopefully today will be better than yesterday. We've been giving her fluids every night too. If she's not sick and her blood values are okay, she'll get treatment every Monday for the next two months. Hopefully it will shock the cancer into remission and we'll have our little black girl for a bit longer. Here's a pic of Olive from what has to be a year ago given the christmas cards on the counter next to her.

And a pic of Luna-tic trying to fit in a cat bed. She has ears like a fruit bat. She caught a tennis ball HARD in the eye last Friday and was really squinting for many hours so paid a visit to the hospital herself last Friday for some eye drops to relieve the pain and swelling. Her pupil was dialated for several days which made her look crazier than usual.

I'll take some belly shots soon and post those. This thing is getting heavy! Some of my maternity shirts are getting a little short in the front... I'm switching to wearing tents soon. No, it's not really that bad. I just need to pull up my pants higher.

health

Sorry that almost a month has gone by since my last post. When leaving Chicago and heading home from the National Conference, I heard that my Grandmother's health was seriously failing so I changed my flight to Omaha for the weekend. I stayed for two days and then flew home Sunday night; Grandmother passed away Monday morning.

Since then I've spent most of my time in the Midwest trying to support my family and get through the grief that comes from losing a Grandmother who wasn't really a grandparent but really a parent. There aren't words to express what Grandmother meant to me - I don't know if there ever will be. I hope that I can remember all of her advice and all of our times together over the years in order to share her legacy with my little one some day. We had a viewing/prayer service at which my sister made an amazing speech that expressed much of what I was feeling/missing about Grandmother. The next day was the funeral. And then Sunday we had a service at the nursing home since Mom was unable to attend the other services.

Of course nearly all of our family was there (or returned) for Thanksgiving which was bittersweet. Grandmother hasn't cooked a big Thanksgiving meal in many years so we weren't missing that... it was just difficult to all be together without her. My sis hosted a baby shower for me on the day after Thanksgiving which was the same - great to all be together but difficult with Grandmother missing. I got to spend a week with Lauri and Lila which was really special even if it was for an unfortunate reason.

Since returning to real life, I've been trying to get things in order. Recovering from missing many days of work, recovering from a wicked cold (can't take anything to relieve it when you're prego) and ear infection, nailing down some baby-on-the-way items, thinking about snow, Christmas and upcoming house guests.

But Olive wasn't eating. So we went to the vet and he said she seemed healthy but did bloodwork just in case which came back TERRIBLE. We subsequently admitted her to the hospital on Thursday where she still sits, poor girl. She has acute kidney failure due to some unknown toxin... or maybe due to lymphoma but we won't have the results of that test until tomorrow. She'll stay at the hospital as long as her kidney function continues to improve. Best case scenario: Olive gets back to normal and we bring her home and it's like it never happened (except for the bill) and we'll never know what the toxin was. Worst case... she doesn't get back to normal, or she gets back to normalish but can't maintain that level, or she has lymphoma. In any case she should be coming home in the next day or two. We've been visiting her twice a day and bringing things that smell of home - got to keep those spirits up!