Quiet Sunday - Heading Home?

Today was a quiet, restful Sunday, especially compared with the commotion from yesterday's visitors. Isabella's appetite is certainly picking up because of the steroids. Last night at midnight, she finished off the other half of a slice of pizza. At 7am this morning, she woke up and asked for more pizza. I ran out to four different pizza spots and none of them were serving before 11am. Instead, I brought back a hash brown which seemed to satisfy Isabella. Until 11am, when she asked for the pizza that she was craving.

She also has not been having the headaches as frequently as the previous days. We had been giving her Tylenol every four hours around the clock to prevent any headaches. In the afternoon, since she hadn't complained of a headache in a while, we decided to stop the Tylenol until she has another headache, and so far so good. We did notice that her speaking was a tick down today, but we are hoping it is only because she is so tired from yesterday. But she is still a hundred percent better than she was when we brought her in. At that time, we were planning to have people visit to say goodbyes. On Friday, we actually had a priest come by to administer last rites.

Our doctor also stopped by and noticed how well Isabella was doing and mentioned that we will probably be able to go home tomorrow (on Monday), as long as there is no drastic change for the worse. As I mentioned before, we'll be tapering off the steroids over the course of the next couple weeks or so, and thankfully we'll be able to do that from home.

We are still unsure about the possibility of upcoming treatments. Because of the bleeding in Isabella's brain, we can't do any chemotherapy since the chemo affects the blood counts. In particular, chemo suppresses the platelets, which is the blood component that stops bleeding. We would have been in serious trouble if Isabella had low platelets while having a bleed in her brain. So for now, we hope that the bleeding in her brain subsides and that the tumor growth does not put additional pressure or cause additional bleeding. Although this immediate crisis seems to be stable for now, we're not completely out of the woods yet, because if we can't control the bleeding or the tumor growth, the pressure will eventually kill her. We also hope that we don't get the "we've done all we could" speech from our doctor.

We'll worry about that then, I guess. For now, we all can't wait to get home.