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The awesome folks at Make A Wish Foundation have granted Serenity a wish! She wanted to meet Snow White so….. they’re sending our whole family to Disney World! We’ll be leaving August 26th and returning a week later on September 2nd.

While we’re there, we’ll be staying at Give Kids The World. We’re really excited to take a family trip there! We’re ramping up for it now and trying to get everything organized.

We’ll be blogging much of our trip and sharing lots of photos and videos here. We’ve received advice from several cancer friends who have made the trip already but would love to hear more from anyone else who has already done it!

In a couple weeks it will be Serenity’s one year anniversary as a Cancer Survivor!

It’s been a while since we’ve updated the site, things have been going so well lately that there hasn’t been much interesting to blog about. Currently Serenity is a happy, healthy, enthusiastic almost 3 year old with a huge love of life! We’ve recently moved even farther out in the “country” to a great place on 50 acres with lots of animals and room to play. She plays outside so much lately that she already has a tan that most people would envy!

She is SO PROUD of all her new hair! She loves to style it to make a little unicorn horn out of her bangs. At the same time she really wants to be like Daddy and thinks she should still have her head shaved. Every time I shave my head she begs me to shave hers. 🙂
After almost a year of regularly taking chemo, and considering how difficult it was a year ago to get her to take it, she is a real trooper about taking her meds. She still has to take several medications each day, depending on the day of the week. Every night I wake her up at midnight to give her her chemo. I just slip the syringe in the corner of her mouth and she either sucks it down or takes it from me and gives it to herself. It’s so nice to have her just take it now and not have to fight over it. Cancer sucks but having made it a year it’s become fairly routine.

I haven’t updated for awhile because we’ve been busy getting settled. We found a place about 15 minutes south of where we were living before. It’s a little further away from the hospital, but the area
makes up for that. I never thought we’d be weighing distance to the childrens hospital in our decisions about where to live, but there you go.

We are further out in the country & surrounded by 50 acres of horse property and farmland. Our landlord lives next door, so the kids have convenient access to his horses, cats, and chickens. The little
ones are loving it!

We got 2 puppies about a week ago, and they are a lot of fun. They tend to get a little rambunctious around Serenity, but when they are calmer she loves to play with them.

March’s routine clinic visit was just that. Serenity’s numbers looked good and we were in and out of there fairly quickly. Her ANC was on the low side (0.7) but nothing too troubling. She is still getting
100% dose of her maintenance chemo. (During maintenance the oncologists want her ANC to stay within a certain range. If her ANC gets too high or too low, they will adjust the dosage accordingly. The
trick is to give the most chemotherapy possible while minimizing side effects.)

Our insurance will not cover Serenity’s care until May 1 because of her pre-existing condition, so we have to make the drive to the hospital for even routine blood draws as well as her treatments. Like so many things in this area, it makes no sense, financially or otherwise.

Serenity is getting better at taking her medicine in the middle of the night. Phil has taken over the job so I am getting a little more sleep. I am still exhausted all the time these days, though.

Last week Serenity ran a fever of 101 and had diarrhea. After a couple hours of it I called the hospital and they told me to bring her in. Even though she was feeling pretty good aside from the diarrhea, it
was a difficult time for her. Once we got into the examination room she clung to me & refused to cooperate for the exams. When the doctor came into the room she burst into tears and was inconsolable. She continued to fuss throughout most of the visit. The nurse practitioner ordered fluids for her, and a dose of Rocephin, an antibiotic. They took blood and stool samples to test for several things, then let us go home with instructions to call if she started feeling worse or her fever continued beyond 24 hours. Fortunately she was feeling substantially better the next day and is back to her sweet, goofy self.