The news is...no news.

We didn't learn anything definitive from this morning's scan.

The cyst is slightly smaller than we saw in her last scan on 11/3. While it's always good to see the cyst smaller, that doesn't really come as a surprise to us since Dr Browd drew 4mL of fluid right after her last scan. What we can't tell is whether the reduction in size is equivalent to 4mL of fluid, or if it re-accumulated some fluid after the draw.

If you read my last post, you'll know that we anticipated this might be a problem. Dr Geyer had thought that if it had been filling up as quickly as it has done in the past, we would have been able to see it. Perhaps it's slowing down, but it's really impossible to know at this point.

So, we'll have another HASTE MRI on 12/8 that will give us a better apples-to-apples comparison.

The HASTE MRI was very quick. And thank goodness for that - Summer hated the entire 30 seconds of it. But after that, she calmed right down. Apparently the entire thing was MY fault because the second she was done she said "All done. I can see my daddy now please?" From leaving Jason in the waiting room to walking back out to meet him, we were probably gone 2-3 minutes total.

Last week, we got a call from endocrinology to go over her lab results from 11/3. Everything looked normal (even her growth factors, amazingly enough), except her thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) is still high, which means her thyroid is not functioning at 100%. This is a little bit contrary to what we'd heard before (from the HemeOnc nurse), but I figure we should trust the endocrinologist to know best about the endocrine function...

The TSH is pretty borderline high, but we've been monitoring it for six months now and it's continually high. Since good thyroid function is especially important for brain development at this age, they decided we should start her on some thyroid medication. She takes half of a tiny pill first thing every morning. Piece of cake. They'll retest her TSH levels after she's been on the medication for a couple of weeks, just to make sure it's working.

They also asked us to come in for another stim test - I'm not sure that I wrote about the actual test itself last time we had this done, but it was horrid. Assuming it all goes well, it shouldn't be too bad, but it didn't go very well last time. She'll have an IV injection to stimulate cortisol production, and then blood draws (theoretically from the same IV...but that didn't really work out so well last time) every 30 and 60 minutes to see how she's responding. That test will be this coming Wednesday, and we'll get the results back at our endo appointment on 11/24.