We are three months out from Lauren's last round of chemo - she is cancer-free and done with chemo! She's been happily staying busy with school, physical therapy, manager duties for the girls field hockey team (fall season) and now manager duties for the swim & dive team (winter season).

At this point, we all expected that her body would be in full recovery mode and we'd start to see her counts trending upwards. Unfortunately, over the last few weeks her numbers have started to decline - so much so that today she spent the day at the hospital getting another transfusion. Her declining blood counts are also impacting her electrolytes as her kidneys are still leaky. While her doctor is a little surprised that her counts are going the wrong way, he did say that her bone marrow took a huge hit from all the ifosfamide she was given to kill the cancer. So while we all anticipated stable counts by this point, Lauren's body is telling us that she just needs a little more. A little more blood, a little improvement of her kidney function and a little more time. Thankfully she remains in good spirits so we will keep at it and get her to the normalcy she is looking for.