Labs (They're SOOOOOO Frustrating!)

I'm getting frustrated to the supreme with labs all over the area. It seems that STAT orders are quite easy to misplace, and even have a tendency to disappear into thin air. Go figure. We still haven't found last Thursday's blood counts. So yesterday Gracie had to get her blood drawn again. The actual draw went quite well, but then they neglected to process it as stat. So today we finally got her counts. The platelets are 210 so she doesn't need to get her blood drawn again until we go to Houston for chemo!!! It's a good thing her counts weren't low because if she needs a transfusion we kind of need to know about it right away and not 2 days later - hence the STAT order. You'd think that labs would be more careful with such things because if her counts were critical that would be a fairly serious liable on the labs part. Wouldn't you say? (No we're not the suing type, but it's still has potentially serious legal consequences for the lab - I thought in the USA they were ultra cautious about such things for just that reason) Legal issues aside that could have very VERY serious medical complications for our little Grace, which is really my primary concern. However, no pokes for a week and a half, that's pretty exciting news. Of course that was only after we went for our flu shots this afternoon. Grace and all of her close contacts are highly encouraged to get the flu vaccine. Of course it has to be the dead vaccine so that meant shots for the whole family and not just the nasal spray. Our 1 year old son isn't able to get most of his 1 year vaccines as they are live and none of Gracie's close contacts are allowed to have any live vaccines for the next who knows how long. That's saying something if little miss hard core pro immunizations isn't vaccinating her own kids. Never say never, eh.

We've been thrilled to welcome my mom back today. And this time she even brought my dad along!! This was actually their vacation that they had planned since May, or somewhere thereabouts. It's been planned since long before we knew Gracie had cancer, it just happens to coincide with round 2. Lots of things just seem to "happen" to work out in our favour.

We got a couple of letters in the mail for Gracie today. One was from Georgia and another was from California. I'm not sure if I know them personally or not (they may be relatives of James' that I'm just not familiar with) but we really appreciate them. They're very cute cards. Also we got our first contact from the Make A Wish foundation. Yes, Gracie gets to make a Wish and we're all pretty excited about it. And what does she want for her wish...why to go to Walt Disney World of course. It's the most popular Wish granted. 5000 kids are sent to Disney by the Make A Wish foundation a year. We don't know any of the details yet we just got a letter telling us they'd meet with us and do their best to grant her wish. It kind of scared me when they first said that Gracie qualified for it as you have to have a life threatening illness to qualify. It drove the idea home for me of how serious this situation is. But now that I've gotten used to the idea I'm glad she gets something good out of all of this. Gracie is thrilled.

Stephanie