Better

Definite improvement today. Mina Brigitta woke up at 7:30, and rather than looking around and closing her eyes again, wanted to get up right away. Throughout the day she had a certain gusto that she didn't have yesterday or the day before. She wasn't quite so clingy or needy, and even seemed to recover some color in her cheeks. Could be that she's finally starting to feel like herself again after kicking whatever it was that was eating her the last two weeks. I also think some of the hard adjustment has been that Isaac is now starting to become a competitor. She's a very sweet big sister, but there are definitely times when she's jealous or wants to take away his toy just because. This would probably have been brewing all this time, but it just didn't manifest at all in the hospital.

She's even finally starting to show some interest in food again. I got her to eat some ice cream last night by showing her the special ice cream spoon with her name on it that Pia Sundqvist's daughter Surya sent from Sweden. Today she had some black beans and avocado ("appa-caw") and some blueberry yogurt with granola (just like "dadda"). She's become a very dainty eater, taking great pains to get the smallest possible bite on her spoon before raising it to her mouth. This is the girl who used to shovel it in as fast she could without stopping to breathe. But then at dinner she had two servings of spinach tortellini and two servings of daddy's moussaka. We're trying to calorie-load by coating everything we give her with olive oil (which she loves) or butter. I also bought some triple cream brie cheese which she seems to like (so does daddy).

It's such a relief to see her feeling better. She's been so sick that it's been really hard not to fret. I've been sort of realizing how much comfort I took last spring in the fact that she did so well throughout the treatment. I figured as long as she was doing so great, she was going to be OK. Well, that was true as far as making it through the treatment goes, but it might have been a false comfort. Dr. Loh has a theory that Mina Brigitta metabolizes drugs faster than most people. This would explain why they keep having to ramp up the doses of antibiotics because the levels in her blood keep coming back too low. It might also explain why she never got the nausea or gut sores or other major side effects during her previous rounds of chemo; perhaps the reason she sailed through the chemo treatment was that she wasn't getting high enough doses. There was nothing to be done about it anyway (there's no protocol for tinkering with doses of the chemo she got), but it's an interesting theory.