The Nausea Begins, Again

I always feel like nothing exciting is going on with Averi, except sitting in a hospital room, and then I sit down to blog about the last few days and I have tons to say...so I apologize for any future long posts about 'nothing.'

The last few days have been pretty normal, you know for a 20 month old who has cancer (to name one of many medical issues) and lives at the hospital with one of her parents while the other one stays at home with her 4 year old sister.  While Dan was with Averi this weekend something amazing happened.  While laying on her stomach, Averi tried to get her knees up underneath herself.

I have visions of her learning to crawl one day.  This being said, I recently counted one of life's little blessings. Being at the hospital is hard enough, but can you imagine being trapped in a room with a crawling baby who tries to climb out of the crib or off the play mat onto the dirty hospital floor?  Maybe it's not so bad that Averi isn't mobile yet and doesn't know that there's a whole other world beyond the edges of the play mat.

After receiving Cycle 1, it took exactly a week for the nausea to kick in, this time it took only 5 days...yes, today is day 5.  Right after lunch Averi got really fussy and then lost her lunch, several times.  She doesn't really give much warning (which is the part that bugs me, not the cleaning it up) and for some reason my brain thought holding her over the floor was a good idea.  Several heaves later, my shoes and pants (up to my knees) were splattered with carrots.

My good friend Tanya who came to visit me today (she's been upgraded to 'good' after today) wiped up the puke while I cleaned up Averi and then took puke filled washcloths from me and replaced them with clean ones as Averi threw up 2 more times.  She also came up with the great idea to use the trash can instead of the floor. :)

After a short nap, the nurse started Averi on some Zofran and IV fluids (I think they learned their lesson from the hypovolemic shock trip to the PICU) and she has been fine since.  I'm not looking forward to tonight.  I never sleep well when Averi is pukey because I worry that she will puke before I wake up enough to hear it and roll around in it or choke on it or breath it into her lungs.  Gross, I know, but also scary.

Speaking of sleeping, Averi has decided the last few nights to fall asleep in some funny positions.She looks like such a poser with her hand tucked up under her chin.

Tonight was pretty cute too with her hands crossed over her chest and her mouth hanging open.  She looked like an old man taking his mid-morning snooze.  If only she were snoring.

Oh, Averi also has a weird raised rash all over her body that the doctors keep saying is a result of the chemo, even though she's never had this reaction before.  They finally gave her some cortizone cream for it but I hope it doesn't turn out to be something worse.  Hopefully we can have a medicine induced unexciting next few days!