Here at Home

Wow, that didn't remotely feel like a hospital stay. Andrew's shot went okay--he cried for a few minutes, but not as hard as when he and Stew bonked heads the other day. The nurse told me about the side effects of the L-asparaginase, the redness, the asthma-like attack, and so I was paranoid looking for any sort of sign of a bad reaction for the next day or so. He's done just fine, thankfully. Apparently, it's almost always the teenagers who get bad reactions from the shot. Man, they seem to get the brunt of a lot of things :(.

Andrew's been feeling okay lately. It's been AMAZING to spend this time at home, waiting for his counts to drop instead of sitting in a hospital room trying to keep him out of trouble. At this point he's sworn off solids completely (which happens every round), and he's needing to nurse a lot, but otherwise he's doing fine.

The plan for the next few weeks is to go back in on Friday (10am, I think), do exactly what we did last weekend (4 doses of cytarabine, and the L-aspar shot), and then do count recovery for a few weeks. As soon as his counts have recovered (I think they require an absolute minimum of 700 for his ANC), then they'll do one last bone marrow aspirate to see if there are any cancer cells hiding out in there. I'm getting really excited for his last chemo on Sunday. After Sunday, he can grow back the crazy hair he was born with!

I think there has been a bit of a disagreement between some people at Primary's over Andrew's line. Having one lumen clotted off is a significant infection risk (but so is having a central line in the first place), but what they want to do about it seems to be different. One doctor said he was borderline for having it re-placed when it first clotted off last round but said we were so close, he thought we should wait. One NP a few days ago was insistent on trying more TPA to see if she could un-clot it (I was not a fan--forcing in saline is what has made it break twice before). Also, they've already tried TPA at least half a dozen times before, and I'm not even sure if clotting is the problem. The NP said she would see if they could re-place it by this Friday. I haven't heard anything, so I guess the doctor won out on that one. I suspect that we'll probably get the line out after they finish doing daily blood draws in about 2 weeks, and before his aspirate, but that's just a guess. It's kind of a compromise between letting it stay in until the aspirate and taking it out ASAP because I doubt they'd make us go through being poked for blood draws every day (although they could just put in a PICC). We'll have to see.

I was under the assumption that after we finish he'd be in every week for blood draws, but that assumption was incorrect--he'll be in once a month for the next little while, once every other month, quarterly, and then they'll want to see him every year until he's 18. For everything else, it's going to be his normal pediatrician. That is such a weird thought! Heck, Andrew doesn't even have a normal pediatrician. We were switching insurances back and forth right around the time Andrew was diagnosed, so I'm not even sure which one I'd go to.

We've been praying hard for Aubree and Tanner--Aubree that she can have her bleeding resolve and Tanner that he can be ready to go for transplant! We check their blogs many times for updates on how they're doing.