Good or Bad news...

Depends how you look at it.

Dr. Al came up from St. Jude. Olivia has what they call evolving leukemia. She doesn't have "full-blown" leukemia, yet. It's more or less premature leukemia.

On one hand - this is great news. She can have time to recover from heart surgery. They won't treat with chemo until she actually has leukemia, so there is no rush for her to get healthy (not that we want her to take her time).

On the other hand - now we just sit and wait for the leukemia to come. How frustrating. That's totally not one of those fun anticipation feelings. There is an itsy bitsy possibility that she will always have evolving leukemia and it won't develop into actual leukemia. It could be weeks, months, or years before she actually develops it. If I understand it correctly, 2%-3% of Olivia's cells have leukemia. They don't consider it leukemia or treat with chemo until it hits around 20%. St. Jude will continue to monitor her blood work. If there are no significant changes, they will do another bone marrow biopsy before she gets off the ventilator. Then we will go from there. So, as of now, the leukemia is on the back burner and we can concentrate on healing from surgery. Oh, they did determine that she has the M-7 type of AML (sounds like a firework to me). Anyway, it's either caused by an abnormality in chromosome 7 or it causes an abnormality in the chromosome 7.

They actually removed her 2 chest tubes today (used for draining fluid from the heart). It's always good when they take things out instead of put things in. She did get her feeding tube put in and a third antibiotic started just to keep her "protected." They have been going up and down on her ventilator settings and on her blood thinner. She isn't tolerating it well when they suction her, but as long as no one touches her, she does great.