treatment day

We are down here at Norton Oncology. They took blood and we are waiting for those results to come back. I think they are just doing a white blood cell count to make sure he can take the chemo. We were hoping to see about the billirubin count b/c one theory says that if that goes down then the tumor might have shrunk causing the liver to drain properly and the billirubin to go down. But that is just a theory and apparently not an important one today.
People have been asking when they will do a test to see if the chemo is doing its job. The answer is: I'm not sure. We are assuming mid-way through the 6 months of treatment they will do a CT-scan to see if the tumor has shrunk but that is a question we need to ask Dr. Hamm.
We thought we were going to see Dr. Hamm today but he isn't in the office so a lot of our questions are on hold.
The immediate concern that we have today is how to get the nausea and other side effects under control since last time went horribly.
They seem to have put a plan in place to combat those issues. He has more nausea medicine before the second chemo so hopefully he won't get sick here. They increased the dosage of one nausea and replaced another with one that doesn't cause drowsiness. We shall see...it can't be as bad as last time, right? He is in better shape going into this chemo treatment than the last. He was still recovering from the stet surgery and still taking pain medicine etc. last time.

His blood counts came back and he is fine in all areas and can receive the chemo today.

We are still working on a schedule for the next time. If we went exactly two weeks it would be the day before Thanksgiving. Um, Happy Thanksgiving, here's a barf bag. So I think they are going to let him wait until the Monday or Tuesday of the following week. This of course will effect Christmas too. If they let us move it to Mondays then it would land on Emily's 5th birthday. That just made me want to cry. We were thinking of telling her that Sunday 12/12 was her birthday since she doesn't own a calendar but if they move it to Tuesdays then we would dodge Thanksgiving, Christmas and Emily's birthday. We shall see. Cancer seems to be a scheduling nightmare. We have too many good things going on to fit in cancer, apparently cancer doesn't care. 5th Birthdays are important. I asked her if she wanted to go to Chicago for her birthday and she asked if she could take her friends in her class. Scratch that idea.

They are starting the first bag of chemo. This one he breezed through last time.

Dear Lord,
Please let this chemo work your miracle and erase cancer from our lives.


I'll try to update again after lunch etc.

Pray for effective chemo with minimal side effects.
thanks for sticking with us. :)