June 7th - Bone Marrow

Paige hated her lumbar puncture and bone marrow today, but then again who would. She's more unsettled after each successive lumbar puncture and today was no exception. She is supposed to lie still for at least 1 hour after she's finished but instead she woke up 15 minutes after being out and cried uncontrollably for the next 15 minutes until we gave up and the senior nurse told me to just hold her up if she would be more happy. She seems to be more aware of the after pain now, as she does the taste of food or rather she may have an odd taste in her mouth but who knows? she certainly can't tell us.

The results of Paige's bone marrow today was inconclusive and her consultant has now requested a Flow Cytometry (this a highly specialized instrumentation science, that uses fluorescent probes to identify and characterize cells) to determine whether the 'blasts' seen are normal or abnormal. If the leukemia has alreday returned after only three weeks, that's not good news at all, and the consultants whilst extremely honest preferred not to speculate. So we'll try our best to get some sleep tonight and hope that the consultant doesn't have a really busy day tomorrow so that she can phone us with the results.

Having a baby with leukemia is difficult, knowing there is a potential cure is comforting, responding well to treatment gives us hope and then everything comes crashing down again when there is this much uncertainty all over again. It just doesn't seem fair.