Dodging Bullets

Just because I always have a story about driving to Chemo I'll give you another one!  We left 3hours before our MRI appointment today.  If you remember our last MRI we waited in line at registration at the hospital for 20 minutes and they wanted to cancel our appointment, and we fought being late to appointments all day long until I felt like a criminal who deserved jail time.  Well i was determined to not be late for MRI today and thus we left in plenty of time.  We hit the 520 and promptly stopped, for about 40 minutes, we sat.  I later learned a car caught on fire on the bridge (word to all motorists stay off the roads when the Noftle's come to town, we are bad traffic luck!).  I called the hospital to tell them I was stuck in traffic and they started in on the "maybe we can squeeze you in next week" speech (for heavens sakes buy more MRI machines!! It's the hardest thing to schedule at this hospital).  I told them how far we were traveling and the Make a Wish trip and so on.  Finally traffic started moving and we ended up getting there about 15 minutes late, imagine if I wouldn't have given extra time.  But still they rushed us through and made me feel guilty (it's not hard to do even children can do it with ease!) again.  They had to access a vein for the MRI and so they said they would just draw his labs for Oncology and Endocrinology since he would have those appointments later today.  For the first time I got to go in with him for his MRI.  They gave me earplugs, I had NOOO idea how loud that machine was, something I never knew before.  Sounds like tons of fun, hold PERFECTLY still while we rack your brain with obnoxious sounds.  Then we went to get his port accessed (after getting his arm de-accessed!) and while he was doing that (new nurse was going soooo slowly bless her heart) I ran to check him into Endocrinology so that I wouldn't get the "your late" speech from them.  When I ran back for Jax he said they drew labs too.  Maybe because he didn't speak up!  When we finished with endocrinology we went to meet with a new oncologist since ours wasn't available today.  She came in and pulled up Jackson's labs on the computer and told us his ANC was only 419, he has to be 750 to get Chemo, plus yesterday he was 500.  I was so sad.  She tried to put a positive spin, go to Florida, relax come back for Chemo when you get home, and I am thinking, you have no idea how this complicates our life.  I asked for a copy of his labs and she printed them out, handed them to me and then just when I grabbed them she snatched them back and ripped them up.  They were another patients labs!  YIKES, so she got our labs up and discovered he had had them run twice today, once his ANC was 911 and once his ANC was 734.  Bounce around much?!  She let us go but showed me a graph of Jackson's ANC over the last 8 months.  At first it looked like mountain peaks, now it looks like a flatlining heart with barely a beat now and then!  His poor bone marrow is getting tired, she said she would be amazed if he could stay on schedule without any major delays while on cytarabine.  But we dodged that bullet to day, and we take it day by day most days!  We are packed for Florida and getting so excited, and I got to see my friend Elaine tonight, (her husband is "in town" for a stem cell transplant) we are only two miles apart here, closer than when we are at home!  Jax did notice that we forgot his Chemo blanket that Elaine made him, his first Chemo without it, I thought he looked "wrong" in his infusion chair without it.  If that's the only thing I forget to pack in the next 10 days I will be thrilled!