ALL

This is King Caleb yesterday (and he looks even better, and less puffy, now) after his bone marrow test. Here he is conducting an orchestra of Mozart while Stella does his echocardiogram.

Here's Caleb, serenading everyone like usual!

ALL stands for Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. This is what Caleb has. B-cell type, for those of you who might understand this type of information. He is currently in a standard risk group. ALL, B-cell, standard risk are all things that tell us that doctors have a good sense of what to do to help Caleb get better. What we tell Caleb is: there are blasts in your blood, and those blasts are making your body sick. What we're going to do now is blast those blasts.

Caleb will remain in the standard risk group for now, and begin treatment hopefully tomorrow. As treatment progresses over the next 32 days, they'll be assessing to see if he will remain in the standard risk group. Further test results will come with time. With this plan of care, we'll be here at Mac for at least 7 more days, possibly more depending if there are complications of any kind. Caleb will receive medecine through something that we're hoping they'll install in his body tomorrow. It's called a "portacath", something we've recently become familiar with through my neices, Sara's girls, Rachel and Janneke. Caleb will have one too. We're so glad that we can give him one of these, it spares him from IV pokes and blood work pokes, just one more discomfort we can spare him. We hope he'll have the portacath put in tomorrow, it will be a surgery for which they'll give him "sleeping medecine" and he won't feel it. He'll have surgery if there's enough time in the operating room tomorrow. It may have to be bumped back, depending on what else happens for others who are scheduled for surgery tomorrow. Pray that we are able to have this done tomorrow.

Many people have asked about visiting. While we are quite social people, especially my singing red-head next to me, we need to limit our visitors at this time because Caleb's immune system is not what it should be. We'll have to stick with the cards, emails, and phone calls that we've been getting up to this point. We'll let you know if and when this changes. We cannot thank everyone enough for the offers of support and prayers and everything that we've heard and received in the past number of days. Caleb's room is becoming decorated with wonderful artwork, and we love it. Send more! :)

Nella is coming now to spend some time with Mom and Dad and Caleb. For now we will enjoy this health and strength and pray for the courage for each new day.