the PICC has left the building

Emily's surgery went well today. We all woke up at 6:15 today and headed off to the hospital for Em's procedure. It got off to a somewhat rocky start. In order for Emily to have surgery her clotting factors in her blood needed to be checked since she has been on Lovenox. They were not able to draw blood from the PICC line so they had to poke her again. She was so upset that they had to give her 2 units of Versed to calm her down. Versed also makes you have amnesia so she also won't remember having her blood drawn. In fact they gave her a stuffed animal after they drew her blood, and 20 minutes later she was asking where the stuffed animal came from. After a while we got the lab results back that told us that Emily could have surgery, so at about 10:30am she went into the O.R. Her procedures lasted around a hour and a half.

She got her implanted port, which I have been calling a "mediport" in previous posts. It turns out that Mediport is just a brand name and she ended up with a different brand, but it's still an implanted port. What does that mean? I had no idea until a few weeks ago myself. Basically she has a little walnut sized bump in the middle of her chest, all covered by her skin. So when they don't need to access it, there are no tubes (or lumen's for the medically trained readers) hanging from her body. She can take a bath, or in the summer she can swim with no worries. When they want to access her port, they stick a needle into the walnut shaped bump in her chest and can attach IV medications to the needle. The access needle can be left in place for up to a week, so when we have things going on every other day we will just keep it accessed and flush it like the PICC.

They also did all the other procedures we were expecting. They removed the PICC line, gave her methotrexate, and took bone marrow for testing.

We still do not have any results of the scans earlier this week.

Emily should not have to go back to Packard until next Monday, when they plan to give her a transfusion, to give her a little boost for the second phase of Chemo, which is now set to start on Tuesday.

Last night to prepare her for surgery we had to scrub her head, and as a result the hair loss is pretty noticilbe. you can now see scalp around much of the top of her head, and all day we have been finding hair everywhere she's been sitting. My best guess is a week from now Emily will be bald. A lot of people have asked me if I plan to shave my head when Emily goes bald as a sign of support. (Not that I have that much to shave :-) ) But Emily is dead set against me doing that or even suggesting it at this point. and other people have asked me if she would like them to shave their heads, and the answer is always no.

That's about it for today's update. My Mom's heart surgery is at 10am tomorrow. She was told today by the cardiac surgeon that she was a walking time bomb and is extremely lucky to have had this caught. If she goes into pain tonight they will do surgery even earlier. They also told her she has between %97 and %98 chance of surviving this surgery, so I feel somewhat assured that she will be ok. Her recovery will be tough, since she also had a knee replaced not too long ago. Once I know she has survived this surgery, this blog will go back to %100 about Emily.

It has also been a while since I said "thank you" to all of you who have been supporting us through these weeks and what will turn into months and years. I can't believe this happened to us, I still can't, but I am so thankful that we haven't had to do this all alone.