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!!!