Deceiving

Last night's "Open House" was tremendous! I was so happy getting to meet a new class of excited students and Christi & Shayla were thrilled about getting settled in their classrooms too! Shayla was happy to be reunited with freinds she didn't get to see all summer and Christi was very serious, carefully putting everything in it's exact and proper spot in her desk. (This will be her first year without Theresa in her class and she has a very heavy heart about that.) Here is a picture with her very beautiful and very nice teacher (and a GREAT one too!). School can't start soon enough- for Christi! (Christi told me last night, "I thought she going to be an old teacher because you said she taught for many years, but then I saw her and she is a really young teacher." Precious!)

While the girls were occupied in the library today, I stepped outside to call the hospital to get the blood results. You know what they say about looks? Hmmm! Irionically, Christi looks and feels great; sadly, her blood counts disagree with that. Blood counts were drawn from her arm at the hopstial this morning. I wish I had better news. Platelets down again (a bit) to 58 and her LDH up (a lot in my opinion) to 401 (300 last week, ugh). Hgb. 10.4 and white 3.7 (both low, but okay). I spoke with NP Pat who said that she or Dr. Maris would get ahold of us yet today, but so far that hasn't happened. Shayne and I will do nothing to interfere with Christi's first week of school next week so we are planning on sticking to this schedule and not flying back to CHOP until Shayne takes her on the 29th for her tests and scans. We do not expect her to be able to continue on this Fenretenid any longer, and we are concerned that pain will soon set in; however, as Christi often says, "It may be impossible, but we can still hope, right?" So we'll hope and pray with all our might that she can stay on this chemo and that it is doing some good, despite the signs of her blood work.

To get my mind off of the news, I loaded the girls up and we took off to the city pool where they were having their "Free Swim Day" - yahoo! The girls swam with some friends from religion classes for five straight hours, only stopping to see what I had packed in the cooler. I read a ton for my class as well as did some pleasure reading. (Christi gave me an assignment: to finish the book we were reading together on my own while she did the same and then to discuss it with her later.)