News to Celebrate

Way back on December 4th, we discovered that Katie was neutropenic. At the time, our biggest hope was that she would be out of the hospital for Christmas. Eight weeks later, she has finally recovered from her nuetropenia, regained a functional immune system and can resume the life of a normal and healthy 3 year old child. Blood tests at Fletcher Allen today showed that Katie's ANC, which had been only 220 last week had climbed to 1040. Anything above 500 would have been great. 750 is the minimum to restart her chemotherapy. Over 1000 is absolutely great! Of course, with numbers as good as that, the at home chemotherapy began again tonight. She received her first pills just before bed, but I digress.

So what did she want to do to celebrate the return of her immune system? She wanted to go to a book store. We went to Barns & Noble. She navigated the aisles of books for nearly an hour, picking up this, and thumbing through that, and the entire time, talking to anybody she came across. In the end, she decided to buy nothing, but she insisted that she was happy. She got what she wanted finally and what she wanted was to just be around people.

As it so happens, she requested a very special outfit last night when we were laying out clothes for today. She wanted to wear a beautiful red dress with red tights and shiny black shoes so that she could show it off to everybody at the hospital. She spent the day posing for doctors and nurses and had to take her coat off to pose for perfect strangers in the book store too. She was in her glory and I am glad that I was there to see it.

Tomorrow, she could finally go back to day care to play with other children again. But as luck would have it, her day care is closed tomorrow so she will spend one more day with her grandparents. She has enjoyed spending time with her grandparents, but she is eagerly awaiting Monday morning.