Family visits and new stuff from online friends!

This is Day 4 of Serenity, my baby, being diagnosed with and treated for Leukemia.  Day 3 is here.

Today started out peacefully, Serenity slept in pretty late – much needed sleep! 

Due to the incredible outpouring of generosity by friends and community online, the ChipIn widget earned over $1,000.00 in less than 24 hours!  Once Serenity woke up, she sat around for a while, picked at her food and glanced at the TV.  Now that she is being more active, we suddenly realized that we don’t have much for her to do here!  We discussed the appropriate use of the donated money and decided that since most of her visitors have brought her something, we would consider some of the donations to be virtual visits.  I headed to the store and bought several new toys that she could play with while on her bed (it really hurts her to stand-up due to her treatments).  While I was gone, Adria got her ready for the day so that when I returned, she was sitting up ready to play. 

 I bought some of her favorite things to play with at home and she really had a blast with them!

As is typical now, after a little while playing she quickly became very worn out and was ready for a nap.

 In the afternoon, all of her siblings showed up for a quick visit:

Her big sister, Talysa, jumped up on the bed and hung out with her for quite a while.  Gibson helped organize her toys and gave her stuff to do with Talysa.

The twins, Indigo and Taran, also hung out for a while.

A little later her big brothers, Kaniho and Sarek, showed up for a while (all the kids are split up, staying with different relatives in different cities).

She also got to visit with both of her grandparents (Adria’s mom died of cancer about 8 years ago), some people from our neighborhood, and some other family friends.  While Kaniho and Sarek were here, she was getting a blood transfusion.

After they left, Serenity started having a bad allergic reaction to the new blood (this is frequently the case).  She very rapidly developed a rash that covered a large portion of her body in about 15 minutes and had to have Benadryll again to combat it. 

(click the picture to view a much larger version)

The Benadryll worked great to knock down the allergic reaction but it made her very tired again.  In fact, she got the Benadryll around 7:00 and has been sleeping ever since.  We’re still learning how to classify her day for her, but we think this was a fair day.

Tomorrow we’ll be announcing a project that several volunteers have been working on.  It’s a full fledged donation site that will very soon have a bank account behind it and an EIN so people can get a tax deduction from donating.  The site isn’t finished yet, but it’s coming together very nicely.  If you want a sneak-peek, you can see it at http://liftingupserenity.com/ I would like to quickly share the story behind the name of the site.  On Sunday morning, just before her surgery, the Hospital Chaplain came by and asked us if we would like her to say a prayer for Serenity.  We happily accepted and during the prayer, she said something that really stuck with us.  She said, “Lord, please lift up Serenity in your arms while she is in surgery” (or something to that effect, unfortunately we can’t remember it verbatim).  Adria’s friend, Amanda, was in the room with us and we all commented that that line in her prayer was particularly beautiful and we decided that her support site should be called Lifting Up Serenity.  Once it is active, that site will become the primary support and reporting site for Serenity’s battle with cancer. 

While I’m sharing name origins, I’d like to share the origin of Serenity’s name and how she is living up to it.

Adria’s water broke on Monday, July 3rd.  We were originally going to name her Xion.  Since it looked like she might be born on July 4th, we decided we would instead name her Liberty.  Well, she wasn’t born until Friday, July 7th.  By that point, we were in full baby naming mode again and thought about the Serenity Prayer.

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

We particularly had in mind the line about accepting the things I cannot change, in this case, as it referred to our baby being born.  We chose the name Serenity for her based on that line and on the name of the prayer.  There may have been (definately was) some influence on me to go with that name given that I love the Firefly series and the subsequent movie “Serenity”.  Now she is living up to both of those sources of her name, fighting cancer definately calls for the serenity to accept things that cannot be changed.  Likewise, the ship Serenity was a brilliant design capable of getting herself out of many a dangerous scrape.  She also kept getting beat up and knocked around, but always came back fighting like mad, just like my baby. 

Please forgive the randomness of the last part of this post, but I was thinking about her name quite a bit today and how she is really living up to it.  Serenity – Go, Fight, WIN!!!

UPDATE: Day 5 is here.

The story of Serenity’s battle with Leukemia begins here.