Day +16 - Up & Up!

Wow, what a difference more white blood cells makes!!! Lyla's cell counts have increased so much the last few days and she's doing amazing!!
Lyla spent all day Sunday and a lot of Monday sleeping and recovering from her rough week. In the meantime, her cells were rapidly growing and headed straight to the mucositis and other areas making her feel bad. Just in the last 24 hours she's been weaned off the morphine drip, moved all medicine from IV to gtube (valve straight into stomach and is a big deal because it means her stomach can tolerate medicine now), she's drinking formula (doesn't always keep it down but at least she wants it!), and she wakes up happy and is not crying in pain. It's so crazy to see the impact and realize how important white cells are to the body. It's difficult to give numbers in a non medical language but basically her cells have tripled in just 3 days! We have been warned that her body is getting help from a medicine that promotes cell growth so her counts will drop once she's off that, but as long as she stays infection free she should have enough to keep her feeling good. We've also been warned that we still don't know if the cells are donor or her own but she has no signs of graft vs host disease so I have a pretty good feeling they are the donor cells! We will find out on day +21 which is next Monday!
Lyla is doing so well the doctors are hoping to release her from the hospital later this week!! We were so shocked to hear this! My goal was for Lyla to be released before her first birthday on September 3rd so this is way sooner and definitely earlier than most kids!
The difficult and very scary task now is preparing Steve and I to take care of Lyla on our own! We are going to classes and asking a lot of questions! Luckily we will be staying just a few miles from the hospital and will have daily visits to the clinic. We've also been told that even though Lyla is doing so well, she will likely have a complication in the next few months requiring a hospital stay and is the reason why we need to stay here until day +100. I say we make bets now that Lyla will beat the odds again!!!