Back to Home Sweet Home

Mom was discharged late Monday afternoon, with much improved white blood cell counts and platelet counts. With improvement of these numbers, her immune function was back up and running, so goodbye thrush, mouth sores, and gastrointestinal infection, hello Uncle Eric's creamed spinach.

And that's not all... after arriving home, she did a meditation, took a nap, housed aforementioned creamed spinach, some lentil and lamb stew, followed by chocolate pudding with whipped cream. Appetite: check.

This morning we were right back at the Cancer Center (hence the tardy blog entry) for intrathecal chemo therapy in her Ommaya port. Her blood work was all where we'd like it to be, so chemo was a go.

To review: she receives intrathecal chemotherapy on Tuesdays and Fridays with the hope that this will keep her cerebral spinal fluid clear of cancer cells (which it has been for some time). If it continues to stay clear, they may reduce these treatments to once weekly.

The systemic chemotherapy directly into her bloodstream is given once every month, and is a combination of 4 chemotherapeutic drugs. These are the treatments that REALLY wipe her out by destroying her immune system and sucking up all her energy. Because this chemo makes her white blood cell counts go so low, she becomes prone to infection, and often has to miss a few doses of her intrathecal chemotherapy. What I want to make really clear, is that none of this is necessarily a bad thing!

We want the chemo to rock her system to the core and kill all the cancer, and it might have really bad side effects with it, but as her immune system rebuilds, these side effects go away, and her energy returns. It is a hard two weeks, but think of it this way: she sleeps a lot and doesn't take visitors or lots of phone calls because she is using every ounce of energy to heal herself from the inside out.

In the meantime, we give her lots of fluids to flush the chemo through and out, and keep her hydrated and nourished as best we can. If things are too hard to manage at home, we book ourselves a few nights at Hotel St. Frannie.

So, today is exactly two weeks from her last systemic chemotherapy, and she's chowing down food, checking email, delegating insane to-do lists to Gwennie and I, swearing at the computer for not working fast enough, and making video rental requests. AKA she's feeling a heck of a lot better.