8 Year Post Transplant Appts in Minnesota- Day 1

8 Year post transplant appointments today started early. We left Uncle Josh’s house about 7:30 to head into the city. Our first appointment today was at the Woman’s Cancer Clinic over by the Ronald McDonald House. It never gets any easier walking your daughter into a place like this (especially when she is only 16 yrs old). Everyone around us is going through some type of cancer treatment. It is a sad place to be in but at the same time there is a sense of being grateful there are specialists like this to help us detect things early on. 

We had a good visit with the doctor here, got a lot of our questions answered and she was able to go back and look at last years blood work to answer the questions we had since we never got a call back from them. There were some personal things we talked about with the doctor that are too personal to even post about on the blog but the doctor gave us hope and gave us information for a specialist to visit back home in Utah. Because of her age they are still just doing simple exams and will get into more in depth exams once she turns 18. As of now, she got a clean bill of health from this doctor. 

Next up we had appointments to get her Dexa Scan done as well as her Bone Age X-ray.  These appts were both  over at the Imaging department at the Children’s Hospital so we headed out and traveled over there. The Dexa Scan is what shows her BMI (Body Mass Index) and the Bone Age X-ray will show if her growth plates have closed or not, which in turn tells us if she is done growing.

                                                    

After both scans we had a 3 hour break before our next appt so we went down to the cafeteria and got lunch and then went outside and set an alarm for an hour to take a nap in the car, we were both just exhuausted. 

Then it was time for her Dermatology appt. They checked all of her cafe ole spots, her moles they are keeping a watch on and we talked about the warts she had burned last year. They have come back so the doctor ended up burning her same finger in 6 places to try to get rid of the warts and wants us to follow up in 4-6 weeks at home to make sure they really go away this time. Then we talked about the importance of swim clothing and staying out of the sun. While there, the doctor said they had gotten a donation of Coolibar (sun protection clothing) and so the doctor went out and found some things in Ari’s sizes. She came back with 2 full swim outfits and a long sleeve shirt. It is probably $250.00 worth of sun clothes. Ariauna was so excited, she was really needing some new sun swim clothes. Yay!!  

That was our last appointment for the day so we headed out. We will be back again tomorrow for more appointments.