Friday, December 31, 2010

The Beginning

Last night, Dec 30, 2010, I received a phone call at about 7:30pm that will forever change our life.

Carter has leukemia.

Wow. We went from talking and laughing with our friends to total shock and chaos within seconds. So we packed our bags and headed to the hospital.

But I guess the real 'beginning' was a few months or more ago. Carter's health and spirits have been slowing deteriorating. He had a cold for a while and we moved to our new house and we just had a new baby so we thought it was due to all this. The past couple weeks, he's still been congested and not sleeping well and has started to look really pale. I took him to the doctor last week and she put him on an antibiotic for a sinus infection. Well, that didn't help at all so I took him back in yesterday. He prescribed a stronger antibiotic for the same thing and then ordered some blood work to be done since he looks so pale. The doctor was worried he might be anemic. So, despite promising him earlier that he would not get "poked" at the doctor, I took him over to the lab and had his blood drawn. We both cried the whole time. About two hours later is when I got the call from the doctor. I knew when I saw the doctor's office on my caller ID that is was not going to be good news since they were calling after office hours on the night before a holiday. He informed me that his blood work was quite alarming with his white blood cell count at about 10 times the normal. His platelets and hemoglobin were extremely low. This was leading him to believe that our son has leukemia and we needed to go to the hospital as soon as possible to have more tests done. So we drove down there, they took more blood, did more tests, and sure enough, our precious little boy has cancer. Wow, that sentence was really hard to type. Chemotherapy will start today.

Please pray for us.