New York City? For some reason the Pace Picante commercial came to mind just now. Yeah, New York City. Upper East Side Manhattan to be exact. 405 East 73rd Street to be even MORE exact. Here we are, in the biggest Ronald McDonald House in the world. 84 rooms, 2 outdoor terraces, many kitchens, and the biggest play room you could imagine. All for $35/night.
The staff here is amazing. The guy giving us the tour kept getting stopped by little kids yelling “HEY MIKE!” and he never failed to give them a few seconds of his time. Everyone is that way. The second we walked in the door, Eli had gifts and Isaiah had admirers. I had paperwork to fill out. 🙂
I have to say, driving here was not nearly as intimidating as I thought it would be. However, trying to parallel park an Explorer on a tiny street lined with cars proved to be a bit much. I needed to get the car to the Hertz at LaGuardia, so I didn’t spend much time looking for a spot. Two times around and I finally pulled into the $20/hr parking garage just 1 block down from the Ronald McDonald House. Several trips back and forth later and I had the car totally unloaded. I thought it was totally worth the $20 until I got back from the airport in my taxi and saw about 100 feet of now available parking spots directly in front of the building. 🙂 Oh well, I had bad timing there, but good timing with our arrival. The New York Jets were playing the New York Giants tonight (American football for my international readers) and there was also a New York Yankees game going on and we managed to miss all of that traffic.
After the priority items were taken care of (getting the wireless internet on my laptop going and hooking up the Nintendo Wii to the room’s television 🙂 ), we decided to head out for supper since we’re probably looking at many days of hospital food in the near future. Kelli DeCap, whose son Dawson also has been in Iowa City and New York battling his Neuroblastoma (www.coins4kids.org), gave us some great tips on being here, so we headed out with some confidence and found a great Texas Rotisserie place on 1st Ave where Eli could have his favorite (“Chicken on the Bone”, aka “Drumsticks”).
So the plan is to be at Memorial Sloan Kettering on 68th Street at 8am tomorrow and get registered and meet some doctors. Of course, as you all know, Tuesday is surgery day. Eli will probably be “in patient” in the hospital for 7-10 days after surgery, then will be sent back to the Ronald McDonald House for another week or so to recover “out patient”.
Many of you have asked how to send us mail while we’re in New York, so here’s the address:
Ronald McDonald House
Eli Horn – Room 303
405 E. 73rd Street
New York, NY 10021
We really appreciate your prayers during all of this. This isn’t a little surgery, it’s going to be quite a procedure as the tumor is still sizable and is still wrapped around Eli’s aorta and other blood vessels. That’s why we’re here in New York to utilize the expertise of Dr. Michael Laquaglia.
It makes me smile to imagine God listening to literally thousands of prayers over the next couple of weeks in regards to one little boy’s surgery, recovery, and safe trip back home. And I think it makes Him smile to hear them. What a great God we have that listens to the earnest prayers of His people and takes action. I just read an example of that two days ago in my daily reading in Isaiah 38:1-6.
Anyway, like the rest of the family has been doing for the last hour, I should get some sleep and be well rested for our big day tomorrow. We appreciate you all so much.