Day 1 bone marrow procedure

Sitting in a hospital room waiting for results is the worse wait ever. At 8am my mom arrived. Of course Bella was ecstatic to see her 'mania'. At 9am the doctor came in bringing a chair. Not the greatest feeling in the world. Let me tell you. She comes in and she says "We have confirmed it is leukemia. And as far as cancer goes, she has the good one. We all know there is nothing good about it but if you have one this is the one you want." At this point I realize my mom has for a better word lost it. She is sitting with Bella on the couch but is very pale and sweaty. She is having a panic attack. The nurses at this point are slightly worried, so one of them takes Bella to the play room and the other concentrates on my mom. Eventually the doctor starts talking again just telling us what she knows as of now from the blood culture and slide. A bone marrow test has been scheduled for 3:30 that will then give us a definite conformation of the type of leukemia she has which we have been led to believe is A.L.L. - Acute lymphoblastic leukemia. the doctor talks to us for a while, answers a few questions then leaves. There is nothing left to do but wait. We head to the play room to see Bella. She is having a blast with all the attention she is receiving in the play room. Becky arrives soon after and for a while we just watch Bella play, playing with her when she decides it's our turn. Around 10:30 Leo arrives. I rush to meet him we hug and just cry for a few moments. He then goes to Bella and loves on her. After a few minutes I decide it's time to talk about the diagnosis with him. All he knows right now is its bad. We go back to the room and I just tell him what the doctor has told me. He says nothing. He just begins to cry. This is hard for everyone and even harder for him. This is his little girl. The one he fell in love with 2+years ago. The one he has protected since the moment she was born. What do mean something is wrong with her? We are supposed to be a normal family living a normal life. We stay in the room for only a short amount of time. We miss Bella and we just want to be with her. Bella is not allowed to eat or drink so what that means is none of us eat or drink. We just cant when we know she cant Around noon they come in to give her a blood transfusion which takes 2 hours. This she needs because her red blood count and hemoglobins are low. At 2 they start the platelet transfusion that takes about an hour. She must stay in her room while she is receiving these because she must be monitored the whole time to make sure there is no adverse reaction to either transfusion. This is only slightly difficult because she has been awake since 3am and is very tired and cranky. Eventually she falls asleep. So while grandma stays with her, the nurses urge us to head downstairs to get something to eat so that we can keep our strength up. At this point I have a killer migraine and know I can't take any medicine until I eat something. Of course nothing sounds appetizing but I decide on a banana. We all eat but no one likes it. We get a call, she is already awake and asking for me. She is not used to people coming and going and the blood pressure cuff going off every 15 minutes. We go immediately to her. When we get to the room, I take some medicine and instantly get sick. Apparently the banana wasnt good enough. Nothing like puking up your guts in the toilet. At 3 they arrive to take her down stairs for her procedure. They will take a needle and remove bone marrow from the back hip bone area. We are in the wait room for only a few minutes. Many people come in at once. They discuss the procedure how long it will take and what to expect. I am allowed to go in with her while they put her to sleep. Leo can't handle to see her in pain so I become the strong one who must be there for her. She fights the mask but in a moment is fast asleep. I head back to the wait room. 20 or so minutes later they roll her back in. She is still asleep and has an oxygen mask on. That was rough. She looked so helpless and so sad. And there was nothing we could do for her. She slept for the whole half hour recovery time and her vitals looked good so we decided to go ahead and just transport her back upstairs while she was sleeping. Of course 2 minutes into the walk she was awake and insisting I climb into bed with her. She was very hungry when we got up to the room so she ate and drank some water. The pain didn't set in for awhile. But when getting up to pee you could see she was very uncomfortable. We ordered some Tylenol that was disgusting and she would not take. Luckily for me I had some infant stuff in my bag so I gave it to the nurse so that they could give it to the pharmacy to confirm the medicine and give her a dose. The doctor came in later in the evening to check on her and make sure she was doing well. She had not received the results of the bone marrow yet but we would have it in the morning Finally around 10:30 she fell asleep, but of course by midnight she was awaken by the nurses taken vital signs. They do this every 4 hours day and night and is very hard to get any sleep. Tomorrow was a new day and all we felt was a blur.


"For with God, nothing shall be impossible." ~ Luke 1:37

Admittance to the hospital

3am and I'm scrambling. I am not sure what to do. Both kids are sleeping. My husband is out of town. The first thing I do is call my mom and of course I'm bawling my eyes out. I choke out what the doctor has said and I believe she goes into shock. She just says where is Leo? Call him and have him catch the first flight home. She said she would head straight down. She lives in Show Low which is a 3 hour drive. I called Leo and just said babe the doctor called and it's really bad. I didn't go into details because I know him and how over protective he is of our babies. Not to mention his long flight home from Chicago. I grab some diapers for Gabbi, my phone charger and I load the kids up. I call my sister Jess to have her meet me at the Banner Desert ER where the doctor has already called to let them know we are on our way. We arrive around 330. We are in the waiting room for a total of maybe 5 minutes where they take us into an exam room. They tell me they need to do another set of blood tests to confirm there was no lab error. Thankfully my sister and her husband show up so they are able to take Gabbi in the hall. This time the drawing of the blood was awful. They had to pin her down and hold her why they inserted the iv in her hand. We waited for results for a good long while. Around 5, closer to 6 the E.R. Doctor came back in and said her platelets were now at 17k which went down even more from the blood test 12 hours earlier. He said we will be admitting her to the hospital. They came and got her around 7 where they took us up to the 7th floor. The oncology ward. At this point I knew it was most likely a leukemia. The question was what type.

"Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified Because of them, for the Lord your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you. "

The Initial diagnosis

Let me start this off by saying thank you to everyone who has been praying continuously for Bella. We have a very very long road ahead. A little over 3 years to be specific if things go as planned. But I will get into that a little later. Bella our first love has always been healthy. Never in a million years would we have thought this would happen to her or our family for that matter. It is true what they say, one day can change your whole life forever. I'm sure people are wondering how we found out and what symptoms she was showing and yada yada. About 4 weeks ago Bella was playing and jumping on a friends trampoline. All of the sudden she was screaming in pain. She had said she fell while jumping. She wouldn't walk or put any pressure on it. So I continued to watch her for a few hours and she still wouldn't walk on it. I decided after talking to our regular doctor to take her to Phoenix children's hospital urgent care since it was a Friday and the doctors office was already closed. They did X-rays and checked her out. Their diagnosis was a toddler fracture and even though one did not show up on the X-ray that's what they believed. This is a common injury in toddlers that jump on trampolines and/or bounce houses and a factor doesn't always show up on the X-ray right away. If this was the case we would do a follow up in a week but no other treatments except she wouldn't be able to walk for up to 6 weeks. If she choose to walk on her own then it probably wasn't that and she just pulled a muscle or something that would heal on its own. She started walking on Sunday so this made us very happy. I didn't want to be stuck at home alone with 2 kids that couldn't walk. I mean can you imagine. So about a week later she hurt her other leg. Same thing. We thought it was from jumping on the trampoline and she was just gonna be one of those that just can't jump on one. She started walking on the just a few hours later so I didn't even take her to the doctor. Well she was still limping a week later, so we decided we needed to take her and see what they thought was wrong. From there he checked her and assessed her. He suggested that we just do some more X-rays see if this was possibly a toddler fracture. During our visit I mentioned fevers that she gets on a frequent occurrence with no other symptoms. He said he would give me an order for blood so that if I wanted to take her in to rule out a few things that would of course be ok with him. We decided to wait to see what the results of the X-ray first and then possibly take her Monday. Over the course of the weekend she had a low grade fever that I treated with motrin and Tylenol. On Sunday Leo and I noticed how she was looking slightly pale. So on Monday after a little persistence from a friend I decided to put us both through that. She did very well and only cried a little. I was expecting results to come in that night around 7 like usual but no call came so I thought to myself that must be a good sign. We went to bed as normal. At 2:58am my cell rang. I thought great some person drunk dialed the wrong number. So I of course ignored the call. A voicemail then popped up so I started to listen. At first I heard nothing but then I am hearing a man speaking. He is saying he believes something is seriously wrong with Isabella and I should call him back immediately. I of course called him right back. He said her preliminary blood results were back and her platelets and her white blood count are very low. He believes it is leukemia. He asked how she was sleeping? Was she sleeping comfortably? I looked in and she was sleeping as sound as normal. So he said I could wait till morning to take her to the hospital but that I should do it immediately when she wakes up. He then asked if she had been running some fevers. And she had all weekend from Friday on. He said I should get up and take her immediately to the E.R. So this is where we headed at 3am Tuesday morning. To end this part of Bella's journey let me just say I am grateful we caught it when we did. God knew what he is doing and will continue to lead us in this journey that we are on.