Doing amazing, as always!!

Well after lots of guilt from my husband for neglecting my blog I am back and ready to update. I am hoping to post regularly now since we are home for a while. Lots has happened since my last posts. Jills doing amazing, as always, and we are home with the family. It is so nice to be home and be able to be with both my babies. We are getting back into our regular routine, although i do think William is missing hanging out with his grandparents so much! I don't know what we would have done without them these last few months, we are so grateful to have such amazing parents. Thank you to you all!

So Jill got through the worst of her treatment. The three months spent in Stanford (off and on) were tough, really tough. We battled lots of side effects from her chemo, nothing too serious, so we got lucky. Home sickness was at the top of our list. But we had each other and we got through it. She is so happy to be home and is currently in Re-induction phase. Which is similar to her induction phase and she is doing pretty good so far. We had a little scare yesterday from one of the chemos she received. She had a reaction that caused her to get a 104 fever. It spiked super quick so it was a little scary. This is the first time she has had a reaction to one of her meds. She comes down with symptoms but not reactions. So we did the usual CBC, cultures and tylenol. Her counts came back great, probably the highest that they have ever been so if she did have an infection then her body should be able to fight it. If her counts had been low then we would have been sent to Stanford. Her oncologists have allowed us to get her treatment done here at home and we have 30 days away from Stanford, as long as she doesn't come down with anything, so we were a bit freaked that we were going to have to head up there. So her numbers came back great so I was able to take her home and watch her here. I kept on eye on her all night and her tempt never went back up so I held off on Tylenol. Since then she has not gotten a fever which leads us to believe that it was just a reaction to the chemo. Its good and bad. Its good because we know what it is but bad because she could react again to the medicine. Over time she can get more and more reactions to the meds so pray that she responds to it good the next time she gets it!

She has been doing really well at home. We have managed to keep her pretty healthy. It would be great to never have to be inpatient again, but the odds of that are pretty slim. But we are going to do our damnedest to keep her healthy! Her hair is finally growing back! She is still holding on to a decent amount and when the rest of her hair grows back I'm hoping she wont look so bald! She still is not having any issues with her hair which is great. This kid is so amazing and is happy all the time. Her hair isn't something that will bring her down! We are so lucky that she is such a terrific child!

This is where i want to give a shout out to a great organization. I think i may have mentioned them before in a post but i wanted to talk about them a little more again. Jacks Helping Hand which is based out of San Luis Obispo has been such a great organization that has helped Daniel and I out so much! Mary who runs the organization has been truly amazing to us. As of now Daniel and I have managed to pay off all our medical bills with all the donations we have received from all you amazing people and from the help of Jacks Helping Hands. Im going to post a little bit of personal information because i really don't care if people know some of our financial business. Because Daniel works for such an amazing company we are so lucky to have really good medical insurance. We love working for ExxonMobil! So as far as our medical bills go it costs us a total of 5 thousand dollars a year to treat Jillian's cancer. No matter how much her treatment costs we will always only pay 5 thousand dollars a year. Unfortunately Jillian got diagnosed in December of 2012. So our insurance hit us with 5 thousand for the month of December (one month of treatment costs well of 5 grand a month) so after January of 2013 we had already racked up ten thousand in medical bills. Quiet daunting don't you think?? Well because we know so many amazing people and Jillian is loved by so many we managed to raise about ten grand from donations and fundraisers. You are all amazing!! We had to use a lot of the money for expenses and living while we were going back and forth to Stanford so much. We were able to use about 7,000 on medical bills. Maybe more too. Well the amazing Jacks Helping Hands helped us with the last bit of our bills this year and we are now officially debt free with medical bills!!! Its such a relief to not have to be so stressed out about how we are going to pay for Jillian's treatment and we can just treat her. So THANK YOU to everyone who donated to JIllian to to Jacks Helping Hands for being so amazing! We now can focus on saving the five grand we need for next years medical bills. Thank you thank you thank you to everyone!!!

Consolidation done!!

We're here and we are doing great!!! So sorry for the lonnnnng break but its just been an exhausting few weeks. Jill and I are currently at the Ronald McDonald house waiting for her numbers to go up so we can go home. This was her last inpatient chemo and she rocked it! No mouth sores, butt sores, hand sores or any sores of any kind as of now! This last block was a bit easier than the first two so we are being optimistic that she will remain in good health. She's doing so very fantastic!

We found out a few weeks ago that William is indeed a match for Jillian if we ever need to do a bone marrow transplant. We were ecstatic to hear this since William is her only sibling. We had to put all our chips on him since we had no other choice right now. He pulled through and is a great match for her. So if things start going in the other direction and she looks like she needs a transplant then we have our donor. Such an amazing thing he can do for her! But as of right now she is doing so utterly amazing that a transplant is no where in the future, especially if she continues the way she is. We could not be an happier with how she is doing. The doctors couldn't be any happier as well! Yay for Jill.

She celebrated her fifth birthday on the 20th an was able to be home for it. She had such a great time at her party. Thank you to everyone who came to celebrate with us. You made her day so awesome. Ill post pics of her fun day.

As far as Jillian goes she's still losing weight. We have been speaking with the hospitals nutritionist about how to keep her maintaining the weight she is at and to put some more weight on her. She's dropped about 8 pounds since she got diagnosed. Which doesn't sound like a lot but on her it is. Plus she needs to keep up as much strength as she can through all this. So we are trying to get her to eat higher calorie foods and more of them. During the weeks she gets chemo she has a really hard time eating and usually drops weight so it's hard then. But she usually starts eating better once we leave the hospital. She already is now. So that's great!

She's still holding on to some of her hair. It's super thinned now and you can see many bald spots. She barely has any left but I am able to put it in a pony tail still so that's good. I was thinking this last block would do the trick but as of right now we are not seeing any loss. She's still happy with her hair too.

Since this is the last inpatient chemo that we will have (unless there is a relapse, which there won't be!) we are now getting into the next phase once she count recovers from this one and has a little brake. We will be coming into re induction 1 which is lots of outpatient chemo which I'm hoping we will be able to do locally. Fingers crossed! This drive up to Stanford weekly is starting to get exhausting so if our docs will let us get most of our chemo done at home then that would be so much better! The doctors said that this phase isn't supposed to suppress her numbers that much, to the point where she shouldn't be nuetropenic that often. So it's possible to live a semi normal life. She wants to get back into dance class which I'm hoping the doctors will be ok with. It's been an exhausting few months so I hope the next are easy. We need some easy ones. So unless Jillian gets sick and a fever then we should be done staying the night at the hospital! So send those prayers that we can keep her healthy. Thanks to everyone for being patient with me. Just know Jill is doing so good. All your prayers are working!!