Surgery Day (Ashley)

Mallory had her last bottle at 4:00am this morning, this little girl is a trooper, she spent majority of the morning and early afternoon curled up in my arms sleeping. She only made a peep when they had to do labs on her. She was even smiling and cooing at us in between falling in and out of sleep.

We met her surgeon this morning and I have to say this is an amazingly talented man. Dr. Robertson is going to be taking care of my baby and the lord has blessed him with the skills that our daughter requires in her extensive surgery. He decided to not operate on the right tumor and talked about how chemo treatment is going to be our best option to try and shrink the tumor and hopefully have it shrink away from the vena cava. If that doesn't work we will be exploring different options, he has dealt with children and adults with far worse tumors that intertwine in major arteries and blood vessels he just doesn't want to risk anything right now if the chemo treatment is successful.

They had a few different people come and talk to us about clinical trials. These involve any extra bits of tumor, blood and bone marrow that they take from her that will be put to use for further reaserch for Mallory and other patients with Neuroblastoma cancer. We opted to do this, everything they take from her will obviously be used to diagnose and treat Mallory first this is just the stuff that they have extra of. These are non invasive treatments, they will only take from things that she is already having done. We are thankful that they are continuing to do research and are finding other treatment options for children like ours. We are hoping that doing this will help the process with other families and other children going through the same thing.

We were very blessed to meet another woman going through a similar experience. Miss Lola, her daughter, is 5 years old and is fighting leukemia. Lindsey has reached out her hand through this horrible process and I have only chatted online with her a few times but she has given us hope, she gave us the biggest hug, and cried with us and we are so thankful to meet her. Even though our daughter is fighting for her life like her daughter is there are still no words we can say to them to make this process any better and vise versa. Its just wonderful to have someone to lean on, ask questions and can go to for comfort and support and knows what we are going through. God bless Miss Little Lola and we pray for her as well and for her family.