Busy - BMT +16

Today was one of those busy days that flew by!

First a little Wii...

Followed by finally breaking into some amazing art gifts (thanks, Debbie!) and an incredible long visit with the art therapist making prints. 

Then we had a special visit from Emma and her mom. Emma is a fellow patient with leukemia and she's spent a lot of her treatment time coming up with awesome gifts and ways to help other patients. What an amazing young lady she is. We keep running into each other all over town, not just at the hospital! Funny! Today she brought Sam a sweet gift basket with a special item picked out just for him. 

You can follow Emma's journey on her Facebook page and even help contribute to some of her great projects. Tell her we sent you...

And then while they were here we noticed a little drip....drip...drip from the ceiling. Yep. A small leak. Drip. Drip. Drip. 

After 26 days in room 585, guess what? Yes. A leak in the ceiling requires us to move. Wouldn't want any mold or whatever to get in. 

It was quite an undertaking with all of our decor (and today's art prints I had actually JUST finished hanging up!!!) and all of our stuff but with the help of Uncle Harry, Bubbie, Zeyde and a few of the hospital staff....whew. We did it. Pretty much a total replica of the previous room.

I said to the nurses as we removed wall decorations and rehung them in the new room: "This should be the worst thing that happens to us." Right?????

(In case you are interested, our room no longer faces east, but north. We overlook the emergency department parking lot and I think we'll be able to see the helicopters when they come in.)

Sam continues to have blood pressure issues so he's learning a lot about how the blood pressure machines work and a that. He even took his nurse's blood pressure today!

Sam tried four different foods today. He didn't actually EAT any but at least he tasted! Hooray! It's a first step. Yay!! (Well, does it count if you eat ONE goldfish cracker? They're so small! How about 2/3 of a pretzel? I don't know....)

So where are we, medically? Working on keeping his blood pressure down. That's a key element. There are a few meds that need to be weaned and some others that need to be transitioned from IV to oral. It's a process that we're happy to be undertaking, even though I'm sure it will have its bumps. But with a continued upswing in his white blood cells (1.4) and a lot of happy doctors counting all those little tiny growing cells (ANC of 210)....we're hopeful that our sojourn in this new room will be far shorter than the one we had in the leaky room.

So I tucked my boy in tonight and he snuggled down into his bed....knowing that the world is full of prayers for his healing, knowing that he is loved and blessed....thank you for continuing to be with us, to support us, to help us be with our family through all of these. We know that we are truly blessed, each and every moment.

A few housekeeping notes:

-- Our town's biggest festival is the Highwood Pumpkin Festival. This year, the Pumpkin Run is on October 19th, and it's benefiting the St. Baldrick's Foundation, one of the largest funders of research for childhood cancer. If you'd like to run, you can go here to register. If you'd like to donate to the St. Baldrick's Foundation in honor of Sam for this event, you can go here.

-- If you're local to Milwaukee or Chicago and you'd like to support the Milwaukee Jewish Day School, where David and Yael are in school, you can buy candy through me. (It's quite yummy, actually, and we're feeling so blessed to have this safe place for our children.) See this form for details and then email me your order at imabima@gmail.com (or Facebook inbox me).

-- Tomorrow night begins Yom Kippur, so you might not hear from us for a day or two -- don't panic! (It's also Shabbat, so you might be accustomed to this regular break in our blogging.) I do want to point out that Saturday, Yom Kippur, is Day +18. I feel a sense of the holy as I consider that on this day we will pray for inscription in the Book of Life....and it will be the day numbered "chai" for Sam's transplant. As we enter into this moment, for all of us, we wish for you a g'mar chatima tova, may you be inscribed and sealed for good, for life, for health, and for blessing.