She's Money!

Our little Queen is anemic.

So Yay!  We get to add another specialist to our team.

It is totally fun to call the Hematologist and have the recorded message say "Thank you for calling The Children's Hospital Pediatric Oncology Department."  And by fun I mean not fun at all.  It makes your heart stop.  I hung up the phone and double checked the phone number.

Yup.

I was in the right place.

In addition to working with your run of the mill blood disorders a Pediatric Hematologist also works with blood cancers.

Children with Down syndrome have a higher risk of developing leukemia than the general population.  Readers of my other blog know my Mother died from cancer.  It was breast cancer, but as far as I'm concerned cancer is cancer.  Chemo is hard.  And I live in fear of my baby, my sweet sweet tiny perfect baby having to go through that.  There nothing I can do to prevent it if it is going to happen to her.

If there is a silver lining it is that the same extra special extra chromosome that makes a person with Down syndrome more susceptible to leukemia also gives them greater than average odds at beating leukemia.

Which is all neither here nor there except it gave me a heart attack to hear my Pediatrician had looked at my baby's blood work and referred me to an oncologist masquerading as a hematologist.

Our Hematologist is fantastic.  He went over every result from our blood test explaining all the number to me, and how the numbers interact with one another,  And yes, while he does deal with super scary blood cancers, he also treats your run of the mill blood disorders, like anemia.

And Lily is anemic.

He prescribed some heavy duty iron drop to be given twice a day.

He warned me the iron drops taste bad,  they will turn her hippo teeth black temporarily and they make her poop scary dark colors.

Awesome.

What he didn't tell me was that my baby was going to start smelling like a bag of old nickels.