NEW YORK, NEW YORK

Well, we are back from our trip to New York. First and foremost, THANK YOU immensely for your prayers...it truly made a difference to me. We arrived at the hematologist's office at 9:30am and finally left at 7:30pm. To say that it was a long day is an understatement. However, we met with Dr. Bussell and together decided that for my case, we would proceed with IVIG treatment once a week along with daily prednisone therapy. Praise God that the rest of the treatments will be at my house instead of a hospital. Starting Sunday, I will have an infusion nurse weekly to infuse the IVIG which should take about 5-6 hours.

I was able to tolerate treatment rather well. I had very few side effects during the infusion and after. Today, however, I am feeling a little weaker than normal, but it's difficult to tell whether it's from the treatment or the trip!

Basically, we have one more major decision to make regarding this pregnancy. At 32 weeks, the doctor will have to go into the baby's cord (much like an amniocentesis, but more complicated) to get a fetal blood sample. If his platelets are low, then they will infuse some of my platelets to him and increase my IVIG infusions to twice a week. My local physician does this procedure, but not often and we are not positive that the environment/diagnostics tools are ideal. The physician in New York does them quite often. The drawbacks of traveling to New York again are (1) making arrangements for a longer stay (5 days)to prepare my platelets and get/recover from this procedure and (2) this procedure has a chance to cause the need for an emergency delivery. If the baby comes this early, he will need to spend time in the NICU. We would then face trying to balance our baby in NY and our other children in Knoxville. We have more information to gather before our decision will be made.

My specific prayer requests are as follows:
1. That baby boy Eaton (James William - "Jake") will be protected from a brain bleed.
2. That I will continue to trust God and lift up our difficult decisions to Him.
3. That I will continue to tolerate my infusions and prednisone therapy in order to be a good wife to Nathan and mother to Mary Caroline and Emily.
4. That I will glorify God during this process.

Thank you all again for all your love, support and prayer during this time.