As of today, Lauren has been in the hospital for a whole week. Lauren continues to be extremely bored, tired and cranky. She hasn't really eaten anything in over a week. But she promises that she will try to eat today. Between her coughing and the medical staff waking her to take her vitals, she has gotten very little sleep. Her coughing keeps causing her to gag and throw up. She threw up a lot last night, watching her do dry heaves really makes me and Hilary nervous. It looks a lot like it did when her BT (brain tumor) was causing it. Her eyes rolled to back of her head and she was totally out of it. But when she was done throwing up, she snapped right back. So that was a relief. Yesterday they did a snot test (stick a tube up her way up her nose, which hurt a lot and made Lauren cry) which reveal that Lauren has para-influenza. While it sounds bad it's the light version of the regular flu. People with normal immune systems would just have cold-like symptoms, running nose, coughing, and sore throat, but for a chemo patient it can be serious. This is what caused her to go septic (shock) back in Dec. '08. So now that we've pinpointed her conditions, they finally allowed her to have some cough medicine last night. They were reluctant to give her any before since it could mask her conditions and/or symptoms. So hopefully she had a good night sleep last night, which hopefully will help her counts to come up.

This whole incident makes me wonder what's going to happen when she catches the real flu?? Just the thought of her starting public school in August scares the poop out of me. This whole incident has really shaken me and Hilary up. We naively thought we were past these type of problems. Everybody keeps telling us that we can't keep in her a bubble, that she needs to live her life. But, forget that. We've decided not to risk it, we're just going to go ahead and order her a bubble. She'll just have to get used to it.

Next MRI August 5th.