Greetings from New York! Did you hear the collective “Huh?” from around the globe? Before you go back and try to find a missing post where we said our plans were changing, don’t bother. There isn’t one. It all happened rather quickly. Unfortunately, the doctor from Blank Children’s Hospital in Des Moines called on Wednesday night and said that he didn’t think they’d be willing to take Eli after all. He said that he had a chance to get caught up with Iowa City on what has been going on and didn’t feel comfortable being the “chemo depot” for New York and that, get this, “If you want to do New York’s treatment, you should get your chemo done in New York.” Sound familiar? He also said that, “I can’t take direction from someone in New York when I’m not the primary care provider. What if something goes wrong? That’s not how I practice my medicine. I have a reputation to consider as well.” That is about the point I wanted to assure him I’d take care of his reputation, but decided I should just move on. After all, if people don’t WANT to help us by giving us chemo, then we don’t want to be there. My opinion is that egos are WAY too big in Iowa. In this case, it’s not threatening the care of Eli, it’s just making things much more inconvenient by making us travel so far away. I feel like we’re being “punished” for picking New York by the doctors in Iowa. It’s frustrating, but it’s nice to be at a place that is very happy to have Eli here and is really dedicated to making him better, not just adding him to the “worked” or “didn’t work” column in their “standard protocol” statistics.
We did end up coming home Wednesday night in the wonderful weather. Hopefully you have all adapted to my sarcastic writing style by now. Thursday we spent at HOME, just the four of us, unpacking and organizing a bit. Thanks to Tanya for bringing us over turkey and stuffing with trimmings so we could still feel like we had a real Thanksgiving meal! Friday we packed. 🙂 We discovered that the nutrition they sent us home on was making Eli nauseous first thing in the morning when he woke up and he’d start the day by throwing up. We didn’t do it last night and sure enough, no throwing up this morning. Once chemo is done, they’ll probably have to put him back on nutrition. New York is much happier that we will be around for recovery this time so they can go right into testing Eli for whatever Neuroblastoma is still left once his counts recover.
So, Kushner confirmed on Friday that he talked to Blank and we were out of options. I told him we’d load up on Saturday and be there first thing Monday morning since we really needed to get Eli going with Round 6. We have the drive to NY down flat. Take off at 7am on Saturday morning (this means staying up until 1am packing on Friday night of course and waking up at 5:45am to get everyone in and on the road on time). Drive until about 10pm on Saturday night, which puts us right at the Ohio/Pennsylvania border. This time we decided to stay on the PA side so we could say we knocked out Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio all in one day. Sunday morning we leave Hermitage, PA at 7am and pull into the Ronald McDonald house around 2pm. Plenty of time to unload and get car returned to La Guardia by 5:30pm. It makes a huge difference coming into New York having already done it once before and knowing exactly where you are going. I felt like a native driving 50 mph down the roads that last time felt like they should be 25mph. 🙂
So, of course being back in New York means the food reviews resume! I knew nobody would want to hear about the University of Iowa Hospital’s overpriced sushi or cheeseburgers! Click Next to see where we ate dinner our first night back in the big city.