The last two weeks have been a blur of activity. Last week’s major event was Daphne falling out of her bed. It happened Wednesday evening. She didn’t seem that upset, but she wouldn’t crawl. The next day she got an x-ray which showed a greenstick fracture in her right wrist. Her doctor did not think the fracture was bad enough to require a cast or splint. She has recovered quickly from it already. The first two days she refused to crawl, but other than that she didn’t seem bothered. She held toys with that hand and even used it to pull herself up to standing. By the third day she started to crawl a bit with it, although when she got tired she started to crawl with her right elbow instead. Now she seems back to her normal self. She is crawling all over the place and walking around furniture. One of her favourite activities is to empty her dresser of clothes.
Our other activities last week was participating in Canadian Blood Donor Week. On Tuesday Daphne, Rowan and I spent some time at the blood donor clinic here in Edmonton and did some interviews with local news channels. I was very surprised by just how many we saw. We were interviewed by Shaw, Global, CTV, City TV, and CBC. A picture of Daphne and I also made it into the Edmonton Journal.
Here is a link to the longest interview aired.
The need for blood is always there. Daphne is alive today because of many people. Amazing doctors and nurses and medical staff played a huge role in this, but they still couldn’t do their job without the donations from regular people. It’s a simple way for the rest of us to help out.
Another major event this week happened Thursday. It was Rowan’s last day of playschool and I had NO appointments scheduled. I was looking forward to getting tons of stuff done while Rowan was at playschool. However, in the morning while the homecare nurses were trying to flush her broviac line, the line cracked. We clamped the line, cleaned it and covered it up with tegaderm. In my broviac education we were told to go to the emergency room if the line is damaged in anyway. I did get Rowan ready for playschool first and then Daphne and I left for the hospital. The transplant coordinator got us into 5F3 (so glad we could by-pass the emergency room!) There some nurse educators were able to repair the line. The process for repairing the line seemed pretty straight forward. The nurses knew exactly what they were doing. Daphne hardly noticed them working on it, she was too mesmerized by Toopy and Binoo on Treehouse. We did have to return four hours later, after the glue had set to see if the line was working and it was. It will be nice that her weekly bloodwork can still be taken without poking her for it.
Another thing that happened this past week was letting our monthly parking pass expire. This might sound like a mundane occurrence to include in this blog, but to me it feels monumental! We have been renewing our monthly parking pass since October. During her PICU time we kept two parking passes. Since her transplant discharge every time the pass was about to expire it seemed like something would bring Daphne back in. With daily parking costing $15 dollars renewing the pass just made more sense. However, this time when the pass was about to expire, there was no need to renew it! Daphne is down to monthly visits with the transplant team. Monday was the first time I had to pay for parking as I left the parkade. I’m sure the parking attendant had never seen someone so happy to pay $7 for parking for two hours. It’s just such a concrete reminder to me of how far Daphne has come!
