Day +173: another positive clinic appointment

Mina Brigitta spent the morning at the clinic for her bi-weekly appointment. All the news was good! She gained weight again, another pound or so. She's now up to 14.2 kg (31 lbs), which is close to what she was when she checked in to the hospital on April 23 for her transplant. Also, she gained another cm in height. She's up to 92 cm (36.2 in.) after being at 91 the last two times and 89 before that. Dr. Cowan says it's common for them to start growing again after they get off the steriods. Dr. Cowan thought the rash on her neck and legs was better, so he's dropping the cyclosporine by another .05 ml, down to .15 ml three times daily. She was on .40 ml when she came home from the hospital.

The other good news is that her blood counts are looking good, much better than last time. Her lymphocyte levels really jumped up, which they're hoping means that her B-cell and T-cell functions are recovering. They took blood today to test for that; we should know the results by the end of next week. Dr. Cowan again cautions that the test may not show anything yet just because of the immuno-suppressing drugs she's on (cyclosporine and cellsept). But if they do, we might be able to start doing more stuff with her.

They're also going to conduct another engraftment study, where they test to see if her blood cells show her DNA of the donors. The last two tests have been 100% donor, so any result other than that would really put us on edge for relapse. These tests seem to take a week too, so we'll all be nervous until we get that result back.

Mina Brigitta has been tired this week. We haven't had much luck getting her to bed before 9:30 lately, so that probably has something to do with it. She gets cranky in the evening and needs to cry it off. Tonight she was being whiny and kind of stinky to her brother, then she screamed when I made her stop. So I asked her if she needed to go into her room and have a cry, and she said "Yeah!". So she went into her room and came back in a few minutes feeling better. Then she sat down and ate a huge dinner of turkey leg that Kaaren, Isaac's babysitter, had given us. Maybe it was all the melatonin, but tonight I put her into bed by herself about 9:00 and she went right to sleep.

The other day on our walk, we passed a house that had had an artist carve a statue of an angel from an old Monterry cypress tree that had to be removed. Mina Brigitta really thought the angel was something. She kept asking to see another one, and she had to show her Momma when she got home how the angel was posed (standing on one leg with one wing straight up in the air). A few minutes later we saw the first star of the night, so I told her to make a wish. She didn't really know what a wish was, so I told her to think of something she really really wanted to have. She said, "Wings! Like angel. For fly away!" It was a cute wish, but we didn't really care for the imagery, so Keri asked her if she wouldn't want to fly to Momma instead. She said yes, that's what she'd rather do, so now she's talking about "wings for fly to Momma."