The ambulance ride to Stanford was tough on Jillian. I was
happy to see her fall asleep 30 minutes into the ride. She slept most of the
time which allowed me to soak in the news that were given to us. We arrived at
Stanford to Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital around 4 a.m. Jillian and I were
both exhausted and she was traumatized from getting poked 6 times from the
nurses back in the ER. We got to our room which would soon become home to us
(Jillian now refers to this room as going back home, which is a bit heart
breaking but I’m glad she is finally comfortable here) We proceeded to do more
test such as blood tests for her blood count and genetic testing to see if she
was at risk for any other chromosome issues (more to come) She also needed to
get a spinal tap and her bone marrow tested to see if the Leukemia cells were
in her spine or her brain, this test would also determine which kind of Leukemia
she had and whether it was low risk or high risk. For this procedure she needed
to be put under anesthesia. You can imagine how scared we were to think she
would be receiving a minor surgery. Since they were going to be pulling out
spinal fluid from her they also do a give her small amount of chemo during this
procedure. This chemo is just a safety precaution just in case there were
Leukemia cells in her spine; they wanted to make sure to treat it so they didn’t
have to go back in. Here is Jillian just before her procedure, acting silly
posing with a strawberry in her mouth:
Jillian rocked the procedure; she came out really groggy but
woke up great and shortly after was happy. During the treatment they put in a
line called a PICC line, the line goes all the way up from her arm down to the
top of her heart. This is where all her blood is drawn from and where medicine
can be administered. Which means NO MORE POKEYS!! Which is so very exciting for
Daniel and I since the worst part of this experience so far was seeing how
scared and how much pain she was in when they needed to put in IVs and I swear
she got every nurse that had no clue how to hit a vein. Here is Jilly coming out
of anesthesia
The results that we got back from these tests were amazing!
Jillian had no Leukemia cells in her spinal fluid or her brain! The doctors
also told us that Jillian had the most common form of Leukemia called Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. From all the research that I
had done, if you wanted your child to have Leukemia this was the one! It is the
most common form of Leukemia in children and the survival rates are 92%-95%. We
were so lucky that Jillian was now diagnosed with ALL and was standard risk.
She was going to fly through chemo and be out of the hospital by Christmas! Little
did we know…..
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