Another tough one today. Brenn has been increasingly cranky, and I don't think that she understands why. They say that the crankiness, and food cravings should be dissipating, but they haven't started to yet. Brenn is on a real roller-coaster ride right now. We had trouble with her VAD (Vascular Access Device) again today. We were not able to get any blood out of it again today. Samantha and I didn't get to the hospital until after they had again tried to access her, this was now the 4th try. I walked in just as they were cleaning up, and got a bit upset at them. They had not checked the chart to see if there had been a problem with it, so Brenn was poked once again. Once they realized that they were having some problems with it, they said that they would take her to get an x-ray of it to make sure that it was in the right place. Brenn was cranky, and Samantha and I were making her upset with our presence, so we came back to Ronald McDonald House for a few hours, and did come chores, made lunch, and found a really big bees nest...Yikes. Luckily neither one of us got stung. That would be the last thing that we want, another trip to the hospital...yuck.

After lunch we puttered around for a little longer before going back to the hospital around 2:30. Brenn had her x-ray, and it confirmed that the VAD was in fact in the correct spot, now all we needed to do to correct the problem was push some blood thinner into the tube, and wait for an hour. Once the hour was up, her VAD worked like it was brand new. I am not to sure why they wasted so many nurses hours messing around with that thing, but I guess it's protocol. We were able to finally get some blood out of her, which should give us some answers by tomorrow morning. We did get some of her blood results back, and her numbers are falling compared to yesterday, but this is not at all unexpected as her blood counts do fall after 7-10 days after her last dose of Vincristine, which was last Tuesday. We will find out tomorrow if the protein in her blood is changing or not, we got a quick result this afternoon that says it has risen by 1 point, but that is not enough by what we understand, we will see what tomorrow brings.

After we were able to get the blood tests out of her, we were able to start giving her some medicine that will help her body process more of the fluid that is making her so swollen. It is a bit of a band-aid, but at least it will help her feel better while we continue to try to find the reason that this is happening. She started her cancer journey at 17.1 KG (37.62 Lb.), she was up to 21.4 KG (47.08 Lb.), went back down to 18 KG (39.6 Lb.) this morning, and is back up to 21.2 KG (46.64 Lb.) tonight. Also, her stomach has grown by 6 cm over the last 12 hours. She is really uncomfortable. I really hope that she will feel better very soon. Tonight they are going to give her some medicine to help her sleep, and hopefully she will start to pee some of her fluid out overnight tonight. Maybe she will be feeling better in the morning.

It has been pretty scary the last few days seeing how quickly Brenns body has been changing, and it awes us that her body is able to stand it. Brenn also awes us in the fact that she hasn't gone off the deep end yet. Christine and I both feel as if we are constantly on the brink of complete loonieness, but Brenn seems to be handling everything in due course. She always has been and continues to inspire us to do better. We are very blessed to have such great children, and we need to always remember that even through these really tough times. I pray that we will always remember

Scott