Surviving COVID

We’re pleased to report another great couple of months in terms of Ellie’s overall progression and health. It has been largely uneventful (except for COVID, but we will get to that…) and Ellie continues to progress exceptionally well. She is fully immersed in schooling activities, including stand up paddle boarding, physical education, limited sport, and of course still loving her academics.

She was due to have a PET scan in November but it has been pushed back to mid-December. Her monthly check-ups have been great and the team are very happy with her progress. Her latest blood results are also great and it looks as though her T Cells and B Cells are slowly ticking over to a level which provides her some degree of immunity, though still well below that of a healthy child. I guess her recent exposure to COVID was the first real test….

In early Nov Ellie started to show some mild cold-like signs with scratchy throat and runny nose. She spiked a temp which lasted for a couple of days and after about 24 hours we were getting ready to take her into hospital. She was due for her monthly check-up the next day so we had planned to wait to take her in instead of going through Emergency which is a painful process. We had Ellie do a RAT just to be safe, and to our surprise, she tested positive to COVID. We couldn’t believe it and thought that things could get hairy very quickly. However, the team reassured us that if she is otherwise presenting clinically well, then we should just ride it out and ‘see what happens’. They postponed her monthly check-up and we were to monitor her symptoms and keep the team updated.

Thankfully, Ellie’s symptoms never progressed beyond very mild flu-like symptoms and after about a week she was testing negative. While it was certainly a stressful few days, it’s really a positive story as it shows that her immune system is actually doing something. COVID is one of the things we have been quite worried about and this was a good test. The oncology team told us the data shows that paediatric oncology patients don’t necessarily suffer any worse from COVID that healthy kids which is very interesting. They are more concerned about chickenpox and shingles in schools. Ellie has since fully recovered and back in school, having only missed about one week.

The flip side is that COVID ran through our house with everyone except Annabelle testing positive 1-2 days after Ellie. Annabelle is the only one who had COVID previously (she’s had it twice) so it makes sense that she has a stronger immunity to it now. COVID hit Kara and I quite hard, knocking us out for a few days with fevers and aches, and still feeling rubbish after two weeks. We were testing positive for around 10 days and still had considerable fatigue after three weeks and a lingering cough into the fourth week. However, we are extremely thankful that it hit us hard and not Ellie. It feels kind of silly talking about our fevers which lasted ‘a couple of days’ knowing that Ellie was highly febrile for literally months on end during the dark days of her treatment!

In other news, November/December has been busy (as it always is). We all recovered in time to see Annabelle perform with the Sydney Girl’s Choir at the Sydney Opera House, Kara and I climbed the Sydney Harbour Bridge (a few years in the making) and Ellie celebrated her 11th birthday with a sleep-over with her besties. Her birthday is 14 Dec but December being crazy, we decided to do it early. Next is Annabelle’s year 6 graduation this week!

Thank you to everyone for your ongoing love and support. We hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and a happy and healthy New Year. We can’t wait to see you all at some stage in the near future!

PC