Day +210: Happy Thanksgiving!

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving. We spent ours with our good friends Rich and Olgica, their son Nikola (who is a few months older than Isaac), Rich's parents, and some other friends of theirs. Rich and Olgica always do a fantastic gourmet meal, so we were well-taken care of. Mina Brigitta and Isaac had a great time playing with Nikola's toys. They have some plastic play equipment on their balcony (a toy kitchen, a little car to sit in with a door and steering wheel, mini-slide), and Mina Brigitta was so enthralled she spent almost the entire time on the balcony. These days when she gets focused, she can be pretty single-minded. She kept driving the car back and forth between the toy kitchen and "Dadda's house", which was what she called one of the little plastic structures. She would get out and fix some num-nums in the kitchen, then get in the car and drive over the Dadda's house. I told her to hold that thought for about 30 years from now.

One thing both Keri and have noticed, and others have remarked on, is just how sober and serious she seems. Isaac was grinning just about the whole day, while Mina barely cracked a smile. Maybe that's just the difference in their ages and being shy in a new environment and around strangers. There are plenty of shrieks and giggles with antas and grandparents and, of course, Amber. Or maybe it's because she's still not fully recovered from the flu. She's been through so much and probably still isn't fully recovered from all of it. So hard to know exactly what's going on with her. But she played pretty hard until about 10:00, when she came and told us she was ready to go home.

After yesterday, she and Isaac both had long, long naps today. Mina slept from 2:30 till about 7:00, got up for a couple of hours, and then went back to bed. We've been a bit worried, because her stools have been pretty irregular the last several days. Tuesday night she woke up pooping three or four times, which really brought back some bad memories for me. Then Wednesday she screamed out in pain with a bowel movement and cried that she wanted to go to the pole house. It was clinic day, so Keri called up there and the on-call doctor wanted to see her in person. He thought she looked fine, but said we should watch her carefully. The big worry would be a recurrence of her graft-vs-host disease, but her stools have reminded me more of when she had the c. diff. infection and the positive CMV test, and not so much like when she had the GVHD. Most likely she still suffering some lingering effects from the Parainfluenza 2 virus. And her bottom has been really inflamed on Wednesday, which probably accounts for the pain she's been experiencing. She only went once today, so hopefully she's recovering again. But it's been kind of nerve-wracking to have to think about some of these issues again.

We didn't go around the Thanksgiving table and say what we were thankful for. It's probably just as well, because I'm not sure I would have been able to keep it together. I have so much to be thankful for this year, it's hard even to know where to start. But I wanted to try to sum it up as succinctly as I could:

I'm thankful that I have a healthy son and a resilient daughter. I'm thankful that we have such a supportive network of family and friends. I'm thankful for the very competent and caring treatment that Mina Brigitta received at UCSF. And most of all, I'm thankful that my children have such an incredibly strong and loving mother.