Visiting Nurses

Today was our first visit from the VNA (Visting Nurses Assn.). They'll be coming here about 2-3 times a week unless Beth and I collapse into quivering masses of ennui and they decide to come every day. But since that isn't an option, they'll stick to drawing the blood samples and changing the dressing on Elle's central line while we deal with flushing the lines once a day and draining her fluid bulb.

The one we had today was great, engaging Elle in the process. She even helped the nurse draw her own blood, which I place in equivalence with Rambo cauterizing his own bullet wound with gunpowder and a flaming stick in Rambo III. Would you draw your own blood? No thanks.

Elle spent most of the day on the couch, but she did color and play while sitting there. There are days she'll have energy and days she won't, and this was one of the down days. She was able to keep down some McDonald's hotcakes and sausage for breakfast, which was great since her nausea only seems to come around that time. And she had lots of milk, juice and soup during the day. I conned her tonight into believing that milk and Ensure mixed together is just another kind of milk. Or maybe not; she gave me the stink-eye as she drank it.

The only chemo she has for the next week is a vincristine push on Monday. So this is pretty much downtime for Elle, short of the weeks that she has no chemo at all. And the bathroom-visiting properties of the irinotecan should fade in a day or two. Then the main concern is a lowered white cell count, which means anyone with coughs and/or sniffles is turned away at the door.