Happy birthday, Queenee!

Today is the Queen's happy birthday! After what she's been through this year, we're all feeling very lucky to have her with us to celebrate another birthday, and we're expecting her to be around for many more to come! Queenee, PopPop and I are heading out to the Olive Garden for dinner. PopPop has been there once before and has decided that he doesn't like their food, although he has no recollection of what he had or where it was. We're dragging him out anyway.

Queenee had her tagged leukocyte scan yesterday. What a long day, holy moly. We got to the hospital at 6:45am and got checked in, then went to nuclear medicine to have her blood drawn. Queenee does not have great veins and is not a good bleeder, so that was, as expected, the worst thing for her. However, after almost half an hour, the blood was drawn and she was fitted with a catheter in the back of her hand, ready to get the blood back at around noon. The tech had her cell number and said she would call us as soon as the blood was ready. We went to the main lobby, where there is a coffee shop and a lot of light, to sit and wait. And wait. And wait.

Queenee brought a book, but wished she had brought two. By the time 9:30am rolled around, she had finished the book and had nothing to do but chat with the few other people who were also waiting around for some reason. At 10:30am we decided to hit the trail, so we went to the gift shop and then to the cafeteria. They don't start serving until 11:30am, so we were sitting at a table waiting for them to open when the lab called. Back down to nuclear medicine, and she got her tagged white cells injected. That took only a minute or two, and she was very happy to be rid of the catheter. We were told to be back at 2pm for her scan, so we headed back to the cafeteria to get something to eat. After lunch, we went back to the lobby, since it was the nicest place to sit. And wait. And wait. And wait.

Finally 2pm came and she was back in the lab for scanning. They got her in at about 2:30pm and the three-part scan took a little over an hour. Then, because we hadn't been sitting around and waiting enough that day already, we got to wait until the head radiologist had a look at the images — they need to be good enough to determine whether or not an infection is present. If they were not, since she already went through the tagging, they would simply rescan the ankle and foot. So after an hour or so we got word that the scans were fine, and at about 4:30pm we headed home. It was almost 6pm when we got home, and as you can imagine, Queenee was beat.

We won't know the results for another couple weeks. Her follow-up appointment is on the 29th. I'll keep everyone posted.