Who Knew...

... that the little girl in my last blog post was so sick? less than 24 hours after those pictures were taken, i was with jane at the emergency room. on that friday evening, she was with ben in the store, and she tripped and fell onto her knee. a huge bruise developed right away, along with some strange red spots. the next morning, (saturday), she woke up with a few more of those little red spots up near her collar bone. other than that, she seemed to be feeling ok. as a mom, i just had a feeling that something wasn't right. so, i put her in the car, and we headed to the ER. when we got there, we discovered that those red spots were called petechiae, and were caused by low platelets in the blood. in jane's case, it turned out that her platelets were very low. apparently the normal platelet range is from 150,000 to 400,000. jane's level was 7,000. since the hospital we were at wasn't equipped to care for her, we were transferred via ambulance to a children's hospital so she could be seen by a pediatric hematologist oncologist.

when we arrived at the other hospital, they did more blood tests, and concluded that she had a condition called acute ITP (Immune Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura). say that three times fast. basically it's an auto-immune disorder of the blood where your own immune system over-reacts and begins attacking your platelets. there's no known cause- although they said it could have come from fighting off a virus? in any case, it had caused jane's platelets to drop off so much that she needed treatment. because her blood type was RH positive, they were able to give her an IV infusion of a blood-product medication that was supposed to give her platelets a chance to re-build.

meanwhile, ben was back at home with anna & lucy, holding down the fort. on saturday evening, he came up to the hospital and switched with me-- i brought a & l home, while he stayed with jane overnight. during the night, they gave her the treatment, and then the next morning i went back to the hospital for the "day shift". during the day, they did more blood tests to check her platelet levels. we hung out, played games, and kept our fingers crossed that she would improve enough to go home that night. thankfully, her last draw on sun. evening revealed that her level was at 55,000. the doctors were satisfied, and discharged us.

she needs to go back at the end of the week for more testing, to make sure the platelets are still heading in the right direction. if that's the case, she may not require any more treatments, and may not ever have this condition again! there's a chance that her levels could dip back down again, so we'll just need to keep monitoring it to make sure, and deal with that if/when it happens. we are incredibly grateful for friends and family near and far... our neighbors brought food and gifts, offered childcare, and went to retrieve our car from the hospital. our family offered to drop everything and fly here to help. ben's aunt and cousins who live close to the hospital offered their homes, even offered to donate blood if there was a need..... my friend jen and her husband gave me medical advice over the phone when i couldn't get any information from the ER doctor. ben's co-workers and officers in charge were very understanding and offered to pick up the slack for him if necessary. friends from afar sent gifts, which brightened jane's day. we also received many, many prayers. i do believe they were heard, and we are so thankful. i'd like to say a big, big thank-you to our cousin mary and her sweet daughter hannah, who spent hours with us in the hospital, giving advice and playing hi-ho-cherry-o with jane like 46 times. =) THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.

here are some pictures i took during those few days. the quality isn't great, since i took them using my phone. as scary as it all was, janey was incredibly brave and kept her sunny disposition the entire time. i love that girl. xoxo