Quick note from NYC

Welcome from New York City! We definitely enjoyed our time at home and made the most of it. Eli spent countless hours outside collecting bugs and other critters (both living and non). We were able to celebrate my dad’s birthday at my parents’ house with Uncle DoDo and Aunt JoJo and finally got to meet Eli’s new cousin Owen in person! Another highlight was seeing our first ever combine demolition derby at the Boone County Fair. Big farming combines bashing into each other in a mud pit until they broke down and couldn’t go any more. Tell me THAT is not Iowan. 🙂 Here is some picture evidence – http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=2205420&l=03f13d9a82&id=556318363

Now we are back getting down to business in our second home in Manhattan. Yesterday we did our “test dose” of 8H9 and everything went well (minus Eli’s typical bad mood brought on by some strong premeds). We did have to get an infusion of platelets first because they were 36 and they need to be above 50. After the infusion, they were in the 80’s so we were all set. We got to the hospital in the morning and were back to the Ronald McDonald House by 7pm or so. We did a scan in the PET machine yesterday and we will do another one today and tomorrow. Then we sit tight until we do the “real dose” of 8H9 next Wednesday. If all goes well (and this is a good prayer request item), we should be able to return home on August 1st and wait for Eli’s counts to drop. They also did a HAMA test today and we should know next week whether we’ll be doing 3F8s next or whether Eli is still HAMA positive (immune to 3F8’s effectiveness), meaning we go onto a Rituxan and low dose chemo protocol to get rid of his HAMA.
There is probably a lot more I should or could say, but I’m trying to get a lot of things done in a short amount of time, so unfortunately I have to keep this short. Thanks to everyone for their prayers!

P.S., for all of my CarePage and CaringBridge friends that write paragraphs and paragraphs and then end up losing it because of a CP/CB glitch and want to cry, PLEASE write out your updates somewhere else and then copy and paste them into your site and hit Submit. Then if something goes wrong with the site, you still have your entire update. If you write them in Gmail or Outlook, those programs will automatically save whatever you write every minute or so (that way if your entire computer were to crash, you will still have most of what you wrote saved). I’ve been wanting to mention that tip because I know how frustrating it is to lose work. At the very LEAST, when you are done writing your update, before you hit “Post”, Select All (Ctrl+A) and Copy (Ctrl+C) your text!