Saving Sarah

Sarah started her first round of chemo with the bone marrow team today.  She has two days of chemo,  two days of rest, then she gets her stem cells back to help her recover. One of the chemo's she gets is excreted through the skin, so there are lots of precautions to prevent chemical burns.  She can't have the dressing on over her central line...that is the thing that scares me the most!  (A central line is a catheter placed into a large vein in Sarah's chest).  We had to have extra help holding Sarah down while we removed the dressing because she kept trying to pull it out.  The nurse made a nice wrap to go around it, but it will have to be changed multiple times a day which leaves the line vulnerable to being pulled out again. She has to have baths three to four times a day until the chemo is out of her system. Her clothes and blankets have to be washed each time she gets a bath. It's a pretty intense chemo....but that's just what these stubborn ...

I have put off writing this blog post because Sarah's treatment plan has been changed a few times.  So if I talked to you you may have heard different stories, but that was the current plan.  Her team of doctors is fantastic and they all wanted to make sure everything was perfect before we started. Sarah starts inpatient chemo a few days after Christmas.  It will be new chemos she has never had.  They are higher doses of chemo than she had before, so high she couldn't recover on her own like she did before....so she will start the stem-cell rescue.  She gets her own stem-cells back that were recovered after her first round of chemo.  Sarah will do two rounds of these chemotherapies, then we will do another MRI to check the tumor.  If everything looks good we will finish the last round of chemo, then go to Seattle for Proton Radiation. (If the MRI doesn't look good we will leave for Seattle for radiation before the last round of chemo).    ...

The plan was for Sarah's surgery today to be around lunchtime.  The operating room called and said they would be ready for Sarah to come down at 8:30.  Nathan was planning on coming before Sarah went down, but with the new time I didn't know if he would make it.  I really wanted Sarah to have a priesthood blessing before surgery.  I asked the nurse if there was any way and she got right on it.  The Branch President for Primary Children's Hospital called me about twenty minutes after I asked my nurse. He told me he was finding out who was at the hospital and available to give Sarah a blessing, but if he couldn't find someone who could make it in time he would be right here.  An employee named Jared showed up shortly after that to give our little angel a blessing.  It was such a sweet blessing...he was pretty emotional, and that made me cry even more. Nathan made it just in time to see Sarah and walk us down for surgery. -Cuddling with Daddy before ...