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So, I've had such a fantastically fun time reading hundreds of thousands of paragraphs in the whole A Game of Thrones series that I thought you all would enjoy reading hundreds of thousands of paragraphs, too.  I took a break between books 4 & 5 to bring you this ridiculously long post with much less fantasy and many more incomplete sentences that start with And.  And I included lots of movies for those of you who don't want to read the book.  There's enough here for you to take three good bathroom breaks with your smart phone.

Worst. Day. Ever.

It’s been a while.  This is the all-you-can-eat buffet of blog posts, with lots of strange things that you would never expect to be side-by-side under the sneeze guard.  As with all things on the buffet, most anecdotes will not be held at the proper temperature and most definitely will have been violated by sticky kid fingers.  Eat at your own risk.

And then some other stuff happened.

I just want to make sure none of you ask me to cut your hair, because I will freaking buzz your brains out.  I make haircuts hurt.  And I smile when I do it.  And I don't wear make-up.

Candy from Strangers

Last Saturday, we packed the circus up and headed downtown to St. Baldrick's.  Eve was happy to wear her new shirt and pin to show everyone how much she appreciates their efforts.  And not just because she likes new clothes and accessories.

Go Pack!

Because I'm friends with the most awesomest photographer I know, we get the most awesomest family pictures.  I'm talking about Wolfpack pride!  Because winter pics with hats and scarves are so 2010.  Or until we decide to wear hats and scarves for winter pics again.

21 stickers, 3 beads, and a couple of faded scars.

Eighteen months off-treatment. It feels like she was just diagnosed yesterday and ten years ago all at the same time. Or maybe I feel this way because I generally have no sense of time and this is why I'm late to everything. BUT! I was not late for her appointment. No Duke Truant Officers on my back.

First off, ultrasound. (Ultra-sound? Ultra sound? Sonogram.) The tech does not rush out and come back in to take more pictures. Always a good sign. Eve receives three stickers.

Beads of Courage

When Eve was on treatment, she was given a beautiful glass bead for every cancer-related procedure she had through Beads of Courage. We tried making necklaces with them, only to have them break apart and fly across the room after many games of tug-of-war gone awry. Of the ones I have been able to recover, and the ones that have not broken, we were still left with a long strand.

Skeeters

It's a wonder Nat hasn't contracted West Nile virus by now; the child must secrete some sort of mosquito-pheromone that drives the suckers crazy. How many bites on her legs? At last count, it was 38, but then again, I ran out of fingers and toes so that's just an estimate. It may be 39.

Funding for Wiisearch

What does it take to keep a 3-year-old quiet in the gallery of the NC General Assembly for 45 minutes?

Approximately:
2 granola bars,
1/2 c. Cracklin' Oat Bran,
2/3 c. Cheez-Its,

The First Annual Pop Tart Walk

$67,048 for a first year walk. Incredible! Team Eve had a phenomenal 169 members and raised $15,827...and there's still money coming in! We were recognized as the top fundraising team, and two of our team mates, Brooke Howells ($2,179) and Jackie Knapp ($1,415), were recognized as top individual fundraisers.

The Graduate

Sometimes we get pictures taken so I can look back and pretend we're a normal family. I'm totally digging that no one asks why we gave Eve a Charlie Brown haircut anymore. I'm going to make normal my beetch!

"What can I do to help?"

I'm cashing in on your offers of help over the past year. I hope you meant it when you said you wanted to do something.

The Griffith Chronicles, Part 100

Never a dull day around here. Why should Sunday be any different?

Saturday night was cake time. I baked and frosted and baked and frosted until my blood sugar shot up by osmosis.

I -heart- fried chicken.

Tonight, our friends and friends-of-friends made Chick-Fil-A look like a clown car. It was packed! We couldn't even find a parking spot.

Matt dropped me, Nat, and Dan off to go eat inside. Good luck finding a seat! Dan found his best friend from preschool and sat down with her. He told me earlier that he wanted to marry another girl in his class, and when I asked why not Cammie, he said, "Because Cammie is my friend. We don't marry our friends."

Escape from Folsom

I wanted Jo (of Jo's PhotoMojo) to take some pictures of Eve in all her bald, scarred-up glory. Because if there was ever an "after" pic, THIS would be it:

Those thirteen tumors never stood a chance.

See the rest of the set here. You don't need to have a Facebook account to view the pics, but if you are on FB, please show Jo how much you love her work and become a fan. If you don't, I'm sending Downstairs Eve your way.

It's complicated.

There are a few phrases no one wants to hear when you talk to a doctor about your child's case. Among these are "very unusual," "extremely abnormal," and my least favorite, "it's complicated." Every doctor we have met has stressed how complicated Eve's case is.

For once, things might look a little less complicated.

The radiation-oncologist called this evening to share the news that Eve will NOT need radiation. [Insert lots of emoticons and exclamation points here.] The final pathology report is in, and it looks as though the resected right kidney still had a little bit of Wilms, but responded great to chemo. The questionable parts of the left kidney that were biopsied showed necrosis, meaning that tissue was dead. Chemo wins! I guess we'll never know if the left kidney actually had Wilms or nephroblastomatoses, but who really cares at this point, as long as those guys stay on Beetlejuice's side of the universe.

Now we need to wait for the hematology-oncology team to get the pathology report and see what kind of chemo treatment Eve will get next, which will start sometime this week coming up. Tentative excitement brewing in our house, although I'm always afraid to get too excited since it's complicated.

General Hospital

As much as I will love and embrace Eve's new belly, I just had to get some pictures of it before it was changed forever. Armed with a bag of conversation hearts and a lot of patience, Jo's PhotoMojo got a lot of great pics yesterday. Go on, take a look at the slideshow here.

We will get some post-op belly pics in a few weeks. Maybe one with a broken beer bottle and a caption that says, "You should have seen the other kid!"

At 8:45 last night, Eve's oncologist called to say they had a game plan. Apparently, emails have been bouncing back and forth across the country, all with Eve's name in the subject line. Do they take out the entire kidney to remove any possibility of leaving cancer behind, or do they try to spare as much of the kidney as possible to preserve as much kidney function as they can?

(Maybe too much information doesn't help you as much as you think?)

The plan was to do renal sparing surgery. I thought this was the plan last week, but apparently plans changed several times in between our meeting with the surgeon last Friday and my conversation with the doctor last night. Anyhoo, early to bed. 4 a.m. wake-up call!

So...
Do surgeons take breaks if they are operating on the same patient for hours on end?
12% of you said yes. They pass the knife off to another surgeon like a relay with Chariots of Fire playing in the background.
8% of you said yes, but they don't share the knife. They leave the patient open on the table and let nurses shove donut holes in their mouths when they feel their blood sugar dropping. (Nobody likes Dr. McShakyHands.)
59% of you said no. No breaks for you.

That's right. No breaks for you. Which was fine, because Eve's surgery didn't take too terribly long.

We arrived at 6 a.m. I carried Eve back to the operating room around 7:30 and she immediately forgot she was in the hospital because she was so hypnotized by the four large screens playing Cinderella. The anesthesiologist placed a strawberry-scented mask on Eve's face, and it couldn't have been choreographed better. The fairy godmother appeared and sang "Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo" just as Eve slowly layed back, eyelids drooping, until she hit the table with a big grin on her face.

We should all get to fall asleep like that.

(I wonder if they popped in a different dvd after Eve fell asleep? Like, Wilms Tumor Excision for Dummies or Scrubs.)

The surgery took about two hours, much faster than we had expected. Everything went well. The right kidney could not be saved as hoped, but the other was left relatively intact, with only a small section removed. The tumorous right kidney and the biopsies of the left kidney and lymph nodes will be FedEx'd to a pathologist in Chicago who has seen pretty much every case of Wilms Tumor in the past thirty years. So yeah, I guess she's kind of qualified to inspect Eve's innards under her microscope.

Eve is in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) right now to recover. Abdominal surgery is no joke; it is quite painful. Her pain meds have been increased to keep her comfortable and let her sleep. As of now, she has her port accessed, and has two IV lines, one of which is an arterial line to get a constant reading of her blood pressure. She also has a nasogastric (NG) tube which is taking all the gross stuff out of her stomach and draining it out through her nose. It resembles pesto. There are a handful of leads on her chest and back which make the image that much more dramatic. Lastly, she has a catheter and we have taken to watching her urine output. There's not a lot coming out, and what is coming out is cloudy, so she keeps getting more fluids to keep her from getting dehydrated. And yes, there was a 10-minute period today when I just stared at that pee-pee bag, willing it to be filled up.

(Oh! And there's this 6" section of bloody steri-strips in the middle of her stomach.)

We are allowed to stay in Eve's room 22 hours out of the day. We lucked out in that we got one of the few private rooms here in the PICU, which meant I could turn up Terminator 2 on the TV as loud as I wanted. (Turns out Eve does not give a damn either way what happens to John Connor. I'll let it slide this time since she's medicated.) We are NOT allowed to sleep in here, though. I guess if there were to be an emergency and the staff needed to get to Eve, they do not want to trip over me outstretched on a short, uncomfortable cot, drooling on the plastic pillow and snoring like an overweight lumberjack. So...as long as we are awake, we can stay in the room. Which has become increasingly harder as the day has worn on.

Matt decided to take tonight's shift, so I will be going home in a bit to get a few hours of rest in our own comfy bed. (Matt, I hope you're not reading this right now. And if you are, don't be jealous. This was your idea!) I'll come back early in the morning and Matt will take his turn going home to get some sleep. We are goofy enough when we are sleep-deprived, so it's best not to be deprived at the same time, lest you want one of us to document the days events by changing the lyrics to Dora the Explorer. (Because I'll do it. Evie, Evie, Evie, Ne-phrec-to-my! Eve is super-cool with just one kidney!)

Hopefully Eve will have a good night and we will be able to move her to a regular hospital room tomorrow. Not only would one of us have a place to sleep, but we know where they hide all the snacks!

Tutu Cute

These were taken by Jo Garvin of Jo's PhotoMojo.