Yesterday was blood work day. We could have it done in a closer clinic, but we decided to keep driving to Children's until this first, most intensive month is over. That way we'll already be there if it comes back indicating a need for transfusion. So 62 miles down I25, to Peña Blvd, to South 225, to Colfax we fight traffic, just for a finger prick to fill a small vial with blood and test it. You'd think this would be a quick in-and-out, but it took two and a half hours of sitting on an exam table in the clinic room, awaiting results, before we could leave.
It was not my day yesterday, as far as being supermom. The constipation has changed back into diarrhea. There is no in between anymore. Daniel awoke once during the night, crying and straining, and I heard him fill his diaper, so I got up and changed it, rejoicing over a slightly harder mass. Then, in the morning, he got me up (Bobby was at work all night) with another one, this time blowing out his diaper and filling his jammies, soaking the barrier blanket he was sleeping on as well as the sheet and mattress pad. Think melty milkshake. I cleaned him up and threw him in a warm bath with several cups of epsom salt, because I am trying anything and everything I can think of that might help his bottom heal faster. Then, throwing Alex in the swing, where miraculously he was happy, I dug through my closet for any clothing that might fit someone who is that weird post partum shape, when their hips have still not tightened up and pulled in enough that their regular pants even come close to zipping, but the rapid weight loss has maternity clothes hanging saggy and baggy. I located a bag of hand-me-down dress slacks, found a few that were four sizes too large for my pre-pregnant self but fit perfectly around my loosey-goosey widened hips. Then realized blown out tennis shoes did not exactly compliment my professional mama ensemble, so to the garage, where I dug until I located a cutesie pair of wedge heels. And my, didn't I look like I had my stuff together, in spite of overgrown eyebrows, chapped lips, zero makeup and frizzy, unwashed hair pulled artlessly back. Oh, well. No time.
I got Daniel out of the tub and dressed him in clothes two sizes too large for him so that his shirt would actually stay down over his buddha belly, then fed him insane amounts of cereal and watermelon. And then his dad came home, so in the few minutes we had left before I had to leave for the clinic, he took him on a quick walk around the block in the stroller, hoping in vain to coax a smile out of him. While they were gone, I quickly sorted the clothes flung about the bedroom in my attempt to find something that fit, starting a pile of clothes for the closet and one for clothes that are too stretched out, torn, or stained to wear in civilized company anymore. Instead of feeding Alex. Who I may have momentarily forgotten existed, since he was sleeping so quietly in his swing. When B got back, we threw the babies into their carseats and I took off with an hour and twenty minutes to make Children's, only to have Alex start wailing, starving, not a hundred yards down the road. I dug in my diaper bag and located the hand pump, and baring one boob to the world (or at least whoever could see inside my car at stoplights), frantically began pumping. Several miles later, I pulled over at a filling station and gave Alex the ounce and a half I had managed to squeeze out, which was enough to calm him down a bit, and I hit the road again, a bit more panicked because now I had used up my time padding allotted for bad traffic. Once I hit the toll road, where traffic was less, I got out the hand pump again and, alternating sides, pumped a respectable eight ounces (told you I was a milk cow) and stashed it in my bag for once we got to the clinic with a baby who was bound to be frantic by then. And then remembered that I had forgotten to give Daniel his morning meds, including his very important steroids. I may have, at that point, said some things with quite a lot of gusto and inflection that most likely lodged in my two year old's brain and will come out with impecable timing for maximum parental embarrassment at some point in the future when his pronunciation is crystal clear. There was nothing to do about it at that point but keep driving and hope we got home to give them to him before the entire day was gone.
Luckily traffic was on my side, if not parking once we got there. I finally located a spot in the farthest possible corner of the parling garage, quickly donned my Moby wrap and slipped Alex inside it on my chest, then slid my Boba carrier on my back and flung Daniel into it, grabbed my diaper bag and started walking with only five minutes to make our appointment time. And then, carrying 40 extra pounds of small humans strapped to my upper body and at least a 10 lb diaper bag filled with everything from water and bananas to diapers to four changes of clothes for Alex, plus toiletries for unforseen hospital stays, I fully realized the folly of my shoe choice, especially considering that apparently my feet have gotten a bit bigger and wider with this last pregnancy. Funny how I didn't notice that tottering around the house feeling all pretty and put together.
In the clinic, we waited about twenty minutes in the waiting room, then they summoned us back to a clinic room where I offloaded both of the babies I was wearing, only to have them both wake up and begin a symphony of wailing. Which was when they took Daniel's blood pressure and found it sky high, prompting them to adjust his dosage of blood pressure medication, since clearly it wasn't working. The nurse pricked his finger and squeezed out a small vial of blood, and then we sat and visited with the nurse practitioner while we waited for the lab to run it. In order to quiet the sad melody my two boys were making, I pulled out a boob and stuck it in Daniel's mouth, and pulled out the bottle and stuck it in Alex's mouth...only to discover the nipple and bottle were incompatible when milk dribbled out all over him, my fancy pants, and the exam table we three were perched on. Since the bottle was a hospital freebie, the nurse practitioner left to get a hospital freebie nipple that would fit it. By the time she came back, I had given up on waiting, bared my other boob, and had both boys nursing, Alex hanging off the table a bit precariously, Daniel doing his best to push him off of me and onto the floor. She left me to carry on, undignified frontal exposure and splayed-out posture on top of a child-sized exam table at odds with my classy pants and cute shoes, and about that time, Daniel saw the bottle and decided he wanted it instead. (Weird, he will usually fling it across the room if I offer it. But sigh. It was his idea. Makes all the difference.) He started chugging the bottle, and this must have triggered an urge to poop, because he started straining...and then his diaper blew out spectacularly. All down his legs inside his cute little khakis. I quickly unlatched Alex and laid him down at the foot of the exam table, sat Daniel down in a spreading puddle of diarrhea, pulled off his pants and rolled them up, shoving them into my diaper bag with a muttered prayer that they not soak everything therein, and used about twenty wipes cleaning him up. I was almost finished when a nurse walked in, then stopped, most likely bowled over by the smell. She whisked the dripping diaper away to a more remote trash can to start the room airing out and offered a pair of hospital jammies, but I assured her Daniel was fine with going pantsless for the rest of the day. We wadded up the soaked paper covering the exam table and replaced it, and because his butt stung from all the wiping, Daniel started crying and wanted to nurse again. And so did Alex. I felt the need to stress eat myself, but settled for chomping hard on a piece of Juicy Fruit gum. Which worked until my angry gnashing somehow caught my tongue and took a sizeable chunk out of it, which bled like crazy and immediately swelled up enormously. And still, the blood work was not showing up. About this time, Bobby innocently texted me, wondering how it was going. I may have replied using a few of the words I had already exposed my children to on the way down.
The nurse practitioner finally bustled into the room, bearing lab results and an apology for the long delay, and bearing the big good news of the day- no transfusions needed. In fact, his ANC had jumped from 90 on Sunday to 200 on Tuesday. No more bobbing along the bottom. The chemo is winning, the cancer cells are frying and dying, and healthy cells are taking their place, producing disease-fighting neutrophils like they are supposed to. Once they hit 500, we might even be able to relax a tiny bit because he will no longer be severely neutropenic, which means he will not be so critically immuno-compromised. His platelets, white and red cells are still very low, but they are still holding steady, so more proof that the chemo is working and helping his little body win this battle. Not that the battle is nearly over, but the nature of this treatment is that if it were a marathon, and the first three miles of said marathon were a twenty percent grade uphill in loose gravel, we have just passed the halfway point of that first three miles. We know we can slug it out for as long as we already have again, and after that, we still have 23 miles of God knows what ahead of us, but we know that it will level off soon. Then we can put our heads down and put one foot in front of the other and eventually get there. He will slowly start to feel better after this.
After he had nursed himself calm and relaxed in my arms, both babies finally drowsing, I asked to have his blood pressure rechecked, and it was normal. But did this mean they could allow him to stay on his same dosage of blood pressure medicine instead of raising it based on his earlier, stressed out numbers? No. No, it did not. Grrr. For some reason, this finally officially put me in a downright ticked-off mood.
I limped myself back to the farthest corner of the parking garage, offloaded two babies into their carseats, noshed on a banana to still the blood sugar shakies, gave the other one to Daniel, flung my shoes under my seat and drove home barefoot, navigating early rush hour traffic back out of Aurora and north. When we got there, Alex was starving again, and Daniel had a bad case of the munchies, so we all ate for about a straight hour and a half, sat and cuddled, tandem nursed, and went to bed early, for a long, sleepless night of explosive pooping. I got him up at 3 am to take his meds, because we have to wait at least ten hours between doses of dexamethasone (steroid) and I didn't get his morning's dose into him until 5 pm. And after that, neither boy slept until the sky started to turn gray, both frantic to nurse, the non-nursing one crying too loudly for the nursing one to fall asleep. I flipped back and forth between the two of them for the rest of the night, until Alex finally got enough that he fell asleep and allowed me to nurse Daniel for long enough that his obsessive nursing finally rendered him comatose as well. And then, in his sleep, he pooped the poop that finally did it- it burst out of his diaper and soaked the blanket I had placed under him, plus the sheet, plus the mattress pad in a big brown puddle. But by then it was morning, so I washed the sheets again, fed him huge amounts of breakfast burrito and watermelon, Daddy got home...and we started another day. But this time, barefoot and in slouchy, ugly sweatpants. Because if I learned one thing from my day yesterday, it's that fancy pants and cutesie shoes can kiss my toddler's melted milkshake diaper.
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