Friday, May 2, 2003

Friday, May 2, 2003 10:15 AM CDT

Luke here.

We are in the middle of the treatments for Nathan's second course of chemotherapy. I had him for day 2 of 3 at the clinic yesterday. All in all, Nathan is handling everything much better emotionally. He has gone to the clinic for his treatments very willingly and been well-behaved and cheery and happy there. He has had his occassional fits, but that isn't too bad for a near three year old being forced to sit through 8 hours of medication and other poking and prodding. Wednesday night he felt fine and ate well. He complained some about his tummy in the late afternoon, but no real problems. Yesterday I couldn't let him eat all morning and a lot of the afternoon because he was having a procedure done in the afternoon (more on that later). After the procedure he just wanted to eat and he had quite a bit of food in the afternoon. His tummy was pretty upset in the car on the way home and he did have some vomitting, but he handled it well and ate a little in the evening and then had a very good night sleep. We didn't hear a peep out of him. The chemo really wears him out.

The procedure he had done was a bone marrow aspiration. The took aspirate from one hip and a core sample from both. They are checking the bone and marrow to see how well they have responded to round 1. This will also give us an idea if we can do the bone marrow harvest between courses 2 and 3. Best case scenario is 2 weeks from now his marrow will look pretty clean and he will be having his marrow harvested in the hospital in Denver (probably 1 to 5 days in hospital). I'm a little nervous about these results. This will be the first real indicator as to whether or not he has responded well to the first round of chemotherapy. We could have some results on the aspirate today, but the core results won't be available until Monday at the earliest. We had been nervous about this procedure as other parents online had said that their kids had significant discomfort with the procedure under similar drugs that our docs intended to use. It wasn't bad at all though. They administered a pain medication and an amnesiac and then numbed the areas where they did the procedure. By far the worst discomfort he was in was when they numbed the areas before the procedure. After that, he was fine and pretty loopy from the drugs. He typically comes down from those pretty hard and was upset for awhile after the procedure, but that settled down and all was well.

He is doing amazingly well. It will be tough to see him start to slide after these treatments, but we know that he can feel better when he comes back up based on the very good weekend we just had with him. This is one tough kid.

We'll let you all know how today's treatment went and how he fares through the weekend. We have more visitors on their way in. Our good friends Brian and Lori Shade are visiting from Missouri and arriving sometime today. Nathan always enjoys Brian and Lori, so this will be a real treat for all of us.