Update on Julia

Dear friends and family,

I apologize for not updating you all sooner but it has been a crazy couple weeks. As some of you know on May 13th (my dad's birthday and the day Julia was diagnosed last year), Julia got to go home. The plan was to stay home until Monday and attend her healing mass, but of course that didn't happen. After only 18 hours at home Julia developed a fever and had to return to the hospital and was started on antibiotics. The strange thing was that her counts (which were almost recovered), had bottomed out again. We have spent the last 10 days waiting and waiting for count recovery. She will begin chemo tonight despite not being fully recovered and she will undergo a bone marrow biopsy tomorrow to see if we can figure out why her counts bottomed out after recovering.

On Friday was PTLD rounds, this is where all the teams; oncology, bone marrow transplant, heart transplant, and infectious disease meet to discuss each case. Julia's oncologist came to see me late Friday afternoon to advise me that in rounds the teams decided they would like our family (me, Elio, Anthony, and Emily) to get tested to see if we are a bone marrow match for Julia. Therefore on Monday the four of us will meet with the BMT team and get tested. As you can imagine this came as a complete shock since we have never discussed this in the past. The idea is that if we get into trouble in the future (another relapse) the bone marrow team will already have our information and know if any one of us is a match for Julia. Although bone marrow transplant is not the plan for us right know (and hopefully ever), it's scary just thinking about it.

Julia has just begun chemo as I write this post, I hope and pray she will stay well and we can get out of here soon. If all goes well we could be home in a few weeks.

Although I was not able to attend the healing mass I heard from multiple people that is was wonderful. People could not say enough about how beautiful it was. I want to thank St Julia's school, in particular Mrs. Lowrie, Mr. Beaudry, and Mr. Grant for all their hard work. I would also like to thank St. Patrick's church for performing a terrific service. I would also like to thank all of you who attended, it means so much to see all the support from friends, family, and even strangers. Wish we were there.

I will keep you all posted on Julia's progress this week.

Thanks again for all the support.

Nadia