{"id":266,"date":"2026-05-25T21:14:24","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T21:14:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cota.org\/cotaformac\/?p=266"},"modified":"2026-05-25T21:14:25","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T21:14:25","slug":"pittsburgh-and-a-trip-down-to-the-river","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cota.org\/cotaformac\/2026\/05\/25\/pittsburgh-and-a-trip-down-to-the-river\/","title":{"rendered":"Pittsburgh and a trip down to the river"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>This trip to Pittsburgh we felt all the emotions. Andy almost drove up with one of the kids, but after praying about it, we realized that would just be too much. And just in case EBV levels labwork did come back high in a week, I&#8217;d really want him to come back for the next visit, if it was a week later.\u00a0 The flight was wonderful and it was so nice to see Mr. John again wearing his Mighty Mac gear. Once we got settled in to Pittsburgh we had our Narnia movie night and had a late bedtime; it takes me awhile to set up all Mac&#8217;s accessories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>We got to the hospital early the next morning and met with our doctor, and she was pleasantly surprised to see that Mac had no swollen lymph nodes. Andy met via telephone and the kids kept Mac happy and entertained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Next, we went to bloodwork and we had a wonderful phlebotomist, Katie, again. We had many more goals this time- a record 18. They ran a few separate labs to test if Mac was building an immunity against EBV as well as additional labs for risk of rejection.<br>We found out that our pilot wouldn&#8217;t be able to fly us back until Sunday so in a change of events and to get out of the city since it was rather cold, we decided to take an hour and a half drive to Parker Pennsylvania and stay down by the river. Mac was absolutely thrilled. It raised all our faith to be around nature and was just we needed. Another fun sidenote, we made it to the park and Max started attempting walking up the stairs!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-9-16 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Pittsburgh &amp; a trip Down to The River\" width=\"540\" height=\"960\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/mGx3CXV8SOo?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This trip to Pittsburgh we felt all the emotions. Andy almost drove up with one of the kids, but after praying about it, we realized that would just be too much. And just in case EBV levels labwork did come back high in a week, I&#8217;d really want him to come back for the next [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2336,"featured_media":267,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v26.6 (Yoast SEO v26.6) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Pittsburgh and a trip down to the river - COTA for Mac<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cota.org\/cotaformac\/2026\/05\/25\/pittsburgh-and-a-trip-down-to-the-river\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Pittsburgh and a trip down to the river\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"This trip to Pittsburgh we felt all the emotions. 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