Something special all the way from Sweden

Today Bianca and Caitlyn got a really nice surprise all the way from Sweden! Sanna's mom sent the girls each a present. Both girls got the nicest bed socks and Bianca also got the cutest pair of gloves. Thank you so much, Lee! You really made their day! Bianca wore the gloves and socks pretty much the whole evening.

The really cute gloves:

Caitlyn doesn't quite have the hang of opening presents yet and Bianca helped her a bit.

Both girls wearing their new presents:

Here is a little video clip of Bianca saying thank you in Swedish:

Today was pretty much just spent at home. Sanna was working only half day as two of her friends from Sweden arrived by bus. They have been touring New Zealand and all of them will set off for the South Island this weekend. I will miss Sanna lots, but it is a well earned break for her. So for the next week and a bit I will be responsible to look after both girls during the day as well as getting Bianca to her hospital appointments so it will be interesting to see how we will manage with Caitlyn who doesn't like sitting still anymore. I can already see who will win that battle...

Tomorrow morning Bianca and I need to be back at the hospital for another blood test to check if her levels are still going down or busy coming up. We cannot start Maintenance until her levels are above a certain level and earlier in the week her neutrophils went down from 0.75 to 0.62 so we are not quite there yet. In the meantime I am enjoying the more flexible routine with no chemo, because once we hit Maintenance there will be an oral chemo Bianca gets every single night for the rest of the 2 years, and with that one she needs to take it 2 hours after supper. So that requires some planning to make sure she doesn't go to bed too late. With that one she has to be awake - you can't really mess around with chemo. I guess by the time we are all done with treatment we will be so used to giving supper by 4pm or 5pm. To think that in my "previous lifetime" usually by 5pm I would wonder what we might want to eat for supper and now I actually have to sit down and plan a bit.

So tomorrow morning Sanna will help out with Caitlyn and then I will take over once I am back from the hospital. I expect they will make us wait for the results, and there is a chance we may need Platelets. But at least that only takes 30 minutes to run once it starts. I hope we won't have to wait too long.

The other day I read on another blog how somebody described having cancer as "waiting". You are always waiting. Waiting to see the doctor, waiting to get test results, waiting for transfusions and medicines to stop running, waiting for the next phase, waiting for levels to recover and waiting to get through a particular phase. Always waiting. If anything this process sure teaches us to have a lot of patience... Nothing wrong with that, but just not always an easy learning process.

So we will see what tomorrow brings in the line of count recovery!

Oh and check out here. This is a site from the NZ Blood Service where you can write in and say thank you to blood donors for donating blood products. Look on the "wall of fame" and you will see Bianca's photo here along with a whole bunch of others. I think this is such a great initiative. So thank you to all of you for donating blood. To date Bianca has had 24 blood product transfusions.

Medicines today:

• Co-trimoxazole (6.25ml twice a day)
  
• Fluconozole - 10 ml at night