Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Almost there, almost.

A little after 5pm central today, Melissa finished her second round of chemo. (Woo!)

She'll still be here a couple more days. The doctors are waiting for the infection on her side to get a little bit better (It's loads better already, but still has a little ways to go before being 100%.) Also, they're going to give her an intrathecal dose of chemo before she goes home. Basically, it's a small amount of one of the chemotherapy drugs injected into her spine. 

Sounds scary, I know. But from what the doctors & nurses tell me, and from everything I've read, it's pretty simple and routine. Still though, scary.

Her treatment schedule is a little different from the model for Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia because her white blood cell count was so high when she was first diagnosed, at least, this is what the doctors tell us. Usually, patients only recieve 3 days of Idarubicin (or Daunorubicin) given for 15-30 minutes a day. Melissa has gotten those 3 days as well as 5 days (overlapping) of Cytarabine, which is given constantly over 24 hours. The next (and final) round of chemo will only be 4 days. I'm not sure about which drugs will be used though.

I'm including this technical info because I've found a couple blogs of people's stories of their fight with this type of cancer and I hope that someday, someone might stumble across this and it will help them in some way. A boy can dream.

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