Home and Lounging

Griffin got the chance to play with his cousin Cosmo in Berkeley yesterday while Brian came over to the hospital to spring us out. The wait to leave took longer than expected as Millie received the first, of what we assume to be many, blood transfusions. She took the transfusion in stride, and perked up quite a bit afterwards with pink smiling lips. I think I need one.

Brian took charge of his weary girls and got us dinner and in bed by 8. He made our bed with fresh clean flannel sheets into which I sunk so happily. Millie was in a good mood as well, and slept soundly until the anti-nausea meds wore off at about 11. The night got long after that. We're pretty sure she threw up the meds- but couldn't just give more. Finally, at 6am we gave another dose and she hasn't thrown up since.

The vomiting is so sad...she retches and shakes and brings up violently and loudly just minuscule amounts from the bottom of her quite empty stomach. Poor poor thing. We hope to get a handle on the nausea to keep her comfortable and not queasy for the remainder of treatment. That is our overall mission- to get through this keeping Millie as comfortable as possible.

We hope for a good, quiet week at home. We know, however, that we are in a neutropenia danger zone all week and may find ourselves back in the hospital. The danger zone is 7-10 days after chemotherapy starts- and ends when her white blood count starts to recover at about 11-12 days after chemotherapy ends. Of course, we only have 9 days between the end of the last round and the start of next one on the 26th- so she may not recover sufficiently in between. She needs to have an ANC count of 1000+ to start chemotherapy- which may be difficult to manage with just 9 days.

Although intense and very tough on Millie and the family, we hope we don't have to delay chemotherapy rounds and can keep to the 2x a month schedule. This schedule has proven to have better success than waiting 3 weeks between chemotherapy rounds. We want to stay with the more successful regimen- but are prepared for delays.

A note on our 6 days in the hospital. We're so pleased to have this second round completed, and only 6 more of these long stays to go out of our treatment plan. It actually was not so bad- as Millie was relatively comfortable for the majority of the stay and handled the chemo well. We were treated with wonderful visitors that broke up the time, and we had a great night nurse for a few of the nights who tried to keep mama asleep as much as possible.

Brian and I feel stronger and more confident about managing this, and just pray for limited roadblocks.