Tuesday September 18th, Unexpected News!

We had soooo much fun at St. Jude today!  Ingram got accessed today which meant the needle was coming towards him and ...Are you ready??  I didn't even have to hold him!!!  This is huge!!!  I never even thought we'd be at this point, but my little man is a stud, a rock star, totally awesome, the bomb...the best patient ever!!!  I wish you all could hear him when he's at the hospital talking to folks; he's definitely not just an oridnary three year old anymore; he carries on conversations with everyone, even doctors, and amazes us all the time!  When he hopped up on the scale, I was surprised to see that he weighed in at a hefty 15.0 kg which is a whopping 33 pounds and he's not even on fluids to pump him up!  This little dude is always eating; even at bedtime, he's learning that I'll get him something to eat if he asks for it.  Personally I think he's figured out how to take advantage of mommy and stall bedtime, but I fall for it every time.

Who loves pizza?  We all do at the Dismuke house and today was Domino's Pizza and Paint Party and it was fantastic.  Ingram started to paint a flower on this huge board; I know, a flower?  He paints a lot with his girls and well, they're girls and paint things like flowers a lot.  Then he decided to turn his flower into a rainbow pizza and painted his entire board with all the colors; he even painted around his "I" without messing it up.  I was so proud of him at how well he was painting.  But, I'm soooo proud that we frequent Dominos Pizza as much as we do because we were able to meet and talk to so many of the employees today.  We actually sat down with the owner of the Memphis/Metro stores and his wife and chatted for quite a bit; Ingram and their youngest are the same age and so we talked about family stuff, school stuff, and of course St. Jude!  They told us that St. Jude is Dominos main charity and they had pledged over the next 3 years to raise 10 million dollars for St. Jude.  Seriously $10,000,000!!!! I started crying when we were talking about this with the ALSAC guys because it means soooooo much to our family.  I mean, just think what all can be done with that kind of money??  So the next time you order pizza, make it Dominos and tell them why you think they're the best pizza company in the world!

As if we weren't already in great moods, we were in our clinic talking with our doctor and nurse about how well Ingram is doing and also about our next round of chemo.  Depending on our lab results Thursday (platelets are still giving us a little trouble but not back down at transfusion level yet), we may start our LAST ROUND OF CHEMO on either Tuesday September 25th or Tuesday October 2nd.  Did you hear that??  LAST ROUND!!!  I know it's crazy to think that this might be the end of chemo; we're still trying to wrap our minds around it but everything so far with Ingram has been going well.  After this upcoming 4th round, Ingram will have another set of scans at the end of October and then a final decision will be made.  We were originally told 4 rounds then they said 6 rounds and we were looking at being done around Christimas time.  Now, there's the possibility of Ingram actually having hair by Christmas time.  Crazy huh???

It's Not Real Clear In The Picture,
But If You Squint Real Hard, You Can Make Out The 15.0 On The Wall!!!

Ingram With Part Of The Domino's Crew!!

Ingram's Flower Rainbow Pizza With An "I"