A Pretty Good Day.

My little sister, Laura, organized a fund raiser for us yesterday along with the Monroe Mason's. It was a huge success and turned out far better than we could have hoped. Although we couldn't be there, we are incredibly grateful to all that came out to support us and enjoy some chicken stew. We want to say thank you to everyone that helped out and donated resources and time to this event. Many of you we have never met and some of you we haven't seen in ages, but you all worked together to support us and that means a lot to us. Thank you.

Now on to PJ. We have had a very good day. Her blood pressure has been her most critical problem the past few days and today, with the help of medication, she seems to be holding her own. She is being weened from dopamine because it has a tendency to constrict blood vessels and aggravate her pulmonary hypertension. She has started epiniphrine, which essentially does the same thing, but at a lower dose and has a lesser effect on the blood vessels. So, today we have seen her dopamine cut in half and the amount of oxygen needed from the ventilator come down about 10%.

Because her BP has been so unstable and will drop dangerously low suddenly, the ICU docs have decided to give her a few doses of hydrocortisone. This is a steroid and as many of you know steroids kill white blood cells. Steroids also kill natural killer cells. Everything we are doing right now has a positive and a negative effect to it and since our goal is to have Piper around to fight leukemia we have to take this chance with the steroids. Our hope is she will get few doses and they will have a minimal effect on the natural killer cells that are in her body to fight that leukemia we can't seem to get rid of.

She is still not labeled as stable here in the ICU, but has improved since yesterday. Her oxygen saturation is staying in the high 90's and her BP, while high from the medications, is not taking as drastic swings as it did yesterday.

We know this is all an answer to prayer and we know that our God is the one that will heal this child. Medicine has it's limits and sometimes those limits are reached sooner than we would like them to be. Piper isn't there yet, but she isn't out of the woods either and prayer and the belief that God can heal her is better than any meds she will get.

Again, thank you to all those that showed your support for us this weekend and thank you to all those that continue to pray for this sweet childs complete healing.

Chad