Long weekend. Beginning on Friday, what started out as a very promising day, turned into an extremely long day. On Friday, it appeared Lauren might be discharged. Her official report indicated a "positive anal wink," which meant she was not incontinence (you are either incontinence or you're not. You are not sometimes incontinence). I'll spare you all the details of how they actually do the test. But just know that when I told the doctor who was performing the test, that on days like this, I bet you're glad you are a pediatric doctor. Because this is one test you wouldn't want to be performing on a 80-year-old. Basically since she had a "positive anal wink" that tells us that there was no compression on her spinal cord, which could make her lose control of her movements. So everybody was pretty confident her spine would be clean. And since she was not in pain from her broken back, they thought she could probably go home and we'd do the MRI on her back in June. But they just wanted to get the all clear from ortho. Of course, we hit a snag. Ortho discovered that she didn't just have one broken vertebra but 5 broken vertebrae. So just as a precaution they felt we better do an MRI on her back now to make sure her spinal cord was good.

You would think by now these MRI would have become routine. But for whatever reason this was the first MRI in a long time that I had a hard time holding back my emotions. Just looking at Lauren and seeing the sadness in her eyes. She looked like one of those prisoners you'd see in the pictures of the Nazi concentration camps - a sad, blank look just staring straight ahead with no hope. Seeing your daughter, who you love more than anything in the world, who all you ever want to do in since she was born was to protect and make her happy. And now she is just sitting there, not speaking, rarely looking at you, and sad. And me and Hilary totally powerless to help her.

All she'll let us do is hug her (for a few seconds before she'll push away). There are times she reaches out to hold your hand, or put her hand on your arm or leg. I imagine it's her way of reaching out to us, to let us know that while she is a prisoner of her own mind, she still loves us and still needs us. Am I going a little koo koo, probably. But it helps to know that we can still comfort her. So…, back to the MRI. After a long painful and stressful wait, the MRI results showed that the spinal cord was clear. No compressions and most importantly no tumors. Whew!!

With a clear and clean MRI, the only issues is what to do with Lauren's broken back and her osteoporosis issues. With one broken vertebra they were just going to send her home. With five broken vertebrae they want to fit her for a brace (which they'll make from a mold of her back). She'll have to wear it indefinitely, at least of until her bones are strong again. As for her osteoporosis issues, I guess there are drugs she can take to make her bones strong, but they need to discuss it with Dr. Finlay to make sure they are ok to take while she is on chemo.

As for Lauren's accidents she has been having she is going to start seeing a child psychiatrist because Hilary thinks Lauren is purposely having these accidents since this is the only thing she can truly control in her life right now. Hil thinks she is mad about being in the hospital, being poked and prodded, awakened at 4 am in the morning by the resident doctors who want to examine her. One resident even asked if it's always this hard to wake her. Ummm, at 4 am in the morning, YES! Hopefully as we wean her from the steroids, her bones will strengthen and her personality will come back. That all we can do right now.