The nurses last night made this for Sally. Have we said how much we love our nurses. 🙂

Hi all – well, first the good news. Sally hasn’t thrown up in two days. Nicole feels that Sally’s vomiting is tied directly to her counts dropping. Now that they appear to be on their way up, the vomiting has stopped. Well, all her counts but her platelets, which are being stubborn.

Sally slept most of the morning. Shannon (Scarlett’s mom) stopped by while on a 9 mile run while she gets ready for next week’s NYC Half Marathon, she and her husband have raised $24,000 for pediatric cancer research at MSK through this race! Shannon came bearing a veggie drink for Nicole and even rocked Sally in the stroller so Nicole could get a break.

We tend to eat poorly when we’re stressed, thank god for Shannon, who knows firsthand what this is like.

After that, Sally had a rough day. She continues to have fits of pain that morphine and other painkillers did nothing to help. Here is some footage of one of these fits, you’ll see how she throws her head back and from :14 to :24 seconds she tightens her muscles and cries out clenched in pain.

Click here for footage.

This went on for twelve minutes and keeps coming and going. They wanted us to try and take her for another cat scan today. Unfortunately with it being a weekend, they can only bring in an anesthesiologist for an emergency. So for hours, they pumped all kinds of drugs into Sally trying to get her to sleep, all to no avail. They also wouldn’t allow her to eat due to the scan. On top of it all, she’s on steroids, which makes her wired. So through three hours of all of that, Nicole brought Sally down to the cat scan only to find out that she obviously couldn’t lie still and it was called off. Although with this being the third attempt the radiologists made little effort to give Nicole the time or effort to try and make it work.

It was a long day and tempers were high so we decided to just spend the rest of the night trying to keep Sally calm and will take it up with the team tomorrow. They will need to decide if this is an “emergency” or not. Who knows, maybe Sally’s platelets will recover and she’ll feel better tomorrow.

Other than that, Sally slept a lot early on and was moody the rest of the day for obvious reasons. In the time I saw her, she was miserable. Although she was calm for a bit when her buddy William laid next to her in her crib.

William asked to lay next to his little sister, and she calmed right down when he did.

I brought the boys in for a couple hours, meeting up with my brother Chris and his kids at the playground next to the hospital. Thomas was baffled by the hospital TV as he couldn’t pause a show he was watching, not realizing normal TV can’t be paused. We all had a pizza dinner together while Nicole and I took turns comforting Sally.

It’s emotionally draining to see Sally like this, even the boys remarked at how they felt sad that their sister was in so much pain. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t see Sally smile once today. She also has a reaction from both the morphine and lack of platelets so her eyes are red and sunken. My heart sank when I first saw her today as she looked so much sicker than when I last saw her the night before.

Trying to rock her to sleep before the scan, but she refused to, and would cry out in pain every few minutes.

Her expression says it all.

Please pray that Sally’s body starts producing platelets tonight and her body begins to heal itself, and pray that she and Nicole have a much needed good night.

Matt