For Cousin Corah

Last Tuesday we went to Dave's sister, Kristy's house for the Cousins Christmas Party. All of the Clawson cousins draw names and get each other presents. This is a picture of Andrew with his first Christmas present, a Build a Bear Dog. He loves it. It is one of the first stuffed animals that he wants to play with. This is Andrew feeding his dog a cookie, he did it first without prompting but I asked him to do it for the picture. We are trying to teach him to share because it is hard when he is the only child and you expect his cousins to share with him, he needs to know how to share too. Thanks Corah for the doggie, he loves it!

Quick Update

Hey everyone. I just wanted you to know that Andrew had another doctor's appointment yesterday. All is going well. His platelete count is up to 28000. Because it is going up naturally and nothing is bleeding uncontrollably they are going to keep him off the medicine. It was good to talk to the doctor, she seemed really up beat and positive about Andrew's progress. As long as nothing goes wrong we don't have to go back to get him tested until the first week in Jan. When we do go back we will be able to go to a local hospital or doctor's office to get the blood test and then they will just fax the info up to Primary Children's. I am happy not to take the drive again anytime soon! (This is Andrew on his walker. He can use it just fine but gets so mad when you try to put him on it. He has fallen on his bum a couple of times and can't seem to forget it!)

Update!

So Andrew had his doctor's appointment today. Things went well, pretty much no news but I guess no news can be better than news. He was of course an angel again and was so good for the guy taking his blood. They even gave him a toy car for being so brave. The doctor said his platlete count is at 25,000. It is lower than when we left the hospital but they expected that to happen. They said it is okay for it to be low because the plateletes that he has are the strong ones from the transfusion. The doctor and I agreed to not put Andrew on the steriod yet. One of the side affects of the steroid is major crankiness and I don't know if I could put up with that. I will be back next week to check him again and see where we are at. As long as he is good and not getting more bruises we should be good. Thank you for all your prayers, please keep them coming. Here are some current pictures of Andrew.

This is how Andrew is "crawling" He is getting pretty speedy like this. He discovered crawling in the kitchen this morning. With the lenolium, he can really speed.

Here is our little angel decorating the tree. He didn't want to touch the star so he is arching his body. I think it looks like he is flying.

Thanks for the comments!

Thanks for all the support that everyone has given our little family. Andrew is still going good. Hopefully everything checks out okay at our next doctor's appointment next Tuesday. Just to answer some questions from the comments... ITP is most commonly a one time illness. There is a twenty percent chance that it could be chronic. We are praying for the best. ITP stands for Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura. Idiopathic means they don't really know what causes ITP. They think it has something to do with the cold and the stomach flu he had two weeks and one week prior. Kind of scary that normal child illnesses can cause such terror! Well, thanks again for everything. I will keep you updated.

We Love Primary Children's Hospital!

So we have had a pretty adventerous/scary past two days. Here is the story...On Saturday morning Andrew woke up and I was changing his diaper and I noticed some bruises on his leg, they were light but I pointed them out to Dave but we moved on. On Saturday night I went to the hospital to visit a friend and Andrew fell over on the hardwood floor hitting his head really hard. On Sunday everyone was noticing the large bruise on the back of his head and so it made me remember about the bruises on his legs. I checked them out and they were much darker. We called some family members to get their imput. Of course we worried and all I could think of was "leukemia". Dave counted the bruises and he had about 30 alone on his legs. So I called the nurse at lunch time on Monday when I picked Dave up. She put me on hold and came back saying we had to get into the doctor immediately. So we went into the pediatritian, they took a look and said it could be anything from anemia to leukemia. They decided that we needed to be sent to Primary Children's where they could do some bloodwork. We went up there to the outpatient clinic and they drew blood but they asked us to stay around until we could collect a urine sample from Andrew. While we were waiting our pediatrician called and said we needed to admit Andrew to the ICS unit. We didn't even know what ICS stood for but when we entered we knew it wasn't going to be good because we were surrounded by small children with cancer. After what seemed like hours of waiting the doctor came in to tell us that they were fairly positive Andrew had ITP. ITP is a blood disorder where your body is extremely low on plateletes because you have developed antibodies that are destroying the plateletes. A normal person has at least 150,000 plateletes per cubit milimeter, Andrew had about 4,000. At 9pm they began to administer a IVIG, a tranfusion of plateletes. The transfusion took about 4 hours but Andrew was so good during it all and slept most of the time. After a long night in the hospital, they re-checked his blood and the platelele count increased to about 43,000. That was good but they wanted to double check for leukemia. Luckily, everything checked out good and we were able to be released around 12pm. We have another appointment next week and hopefully the platelete count continues to increase. We were so scarred but he feel so blessed that it was something that was easily controlled and taken care of. Dave and I both felt that leaving the hospital was bittersweet because we were so happy that Andrew was okay but to see all those poor children was just heartbreaking. The nurses, staff, and doctors at Primary Childrens were just amamzing. I don't think that I could have felt anymore confortable at the hospital than they made me. Here are some pictures of Andrew we took when we got home from the hospital. Hopefully these bruises go away soon.



As you can see, Andrew is showing no other signs of an illness except the bruises. We are proud of our brave boy and are so happy that he is still happy!