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April 14, 2005
By Laurel | April 14, 2005
Four rounds of chemo down, two more plus stem cell transplant to go! We are home from the hospital tonight and have just finished round four. The nausea wasn’t too bad this round. We finally got it through our thick heads that dairy foods don’t go well with chemo. Yes, you might have thought that would have been intuitive or that it might have dawned on us during round two or so but here we are on round four and have finally figured out that there is much less throwing up going on without milk, cheese, etc. in Sam’s diet. We’re actually getting pretty good at knowing which foods don’t go well and which ones do (not all of them are as obvious as dairy).
We had a good meeting with Sam’s oncologist, Dr. Sprehe, that Neil set up. Dr. Sprehe is going to help us decide on which anti-body protocol to go with and try to get us some more detail on the latest CT scan (how much the tumor actually shrank). We’ll have more scans after round five which will be right before surgery (end of May probably) so our surgeon, Dr. Seinz, knows what he’s dealing with.
My dad and I also met with the audiologist to talk about Sam’s results. She explained to me what he’s hearing now and a little bit about hearing aids and what to expect. The good news is that if his hearing stays as it is now, he’ll be totoally brought up to normal with hearing aids. In terms of speech, he’s missing the high frequencies which include “s,” “ch,” “th” and “k” sounds. She said he’ll become really good at watching people’s lips but without hearing aids would miss a lot in school when the teacher turns around to write on the chalk board. We’ll wait until we’re finished with Cisplatin and stem cell transplant to get him fitted though.
Sammy had a roommate named Noah, a big seven year old, who he really liked and they played video games and rode their IV poles down the hall and played in the play room together. Noah had a Tony Hawk video game that was a big hit with Sam. We read more of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory -we’re almost finished -and some Scooby Doo books. He rode the hospital bike around the halls last night when we got tired of video games.
Sammy is now a fan of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles so we’ve been talking about the chemo pumping Mutant Ninja Turtles into him to conquer the bump and to protect his stomach. He likes that visualization. He’s been outside running around since he got home and he is very happy to be here.
Andy had a good week too. Grandpa was here and he bonded with him and kept him very busy. Andy saw at least five trash trucks this week and we even chased a few down the alleys and watched in awe as they hooked into the dumpsters and lifted them up to dump out the trash. You would have thought Andy had won the lotto. The trash guys all know him now and wave and honk as they go by. Our little bundle of energy is sleeping at the moment (6:43 pm) because he had no nap today and it’s about 50/50 whether he’ll sleep all night or wake up at 9 and be up until midnight.
Next week Sam’s counts will be down so hopefully we won’t bounce back in again. We have clinic on Monday and Thursday to check counts. Thanks to everyone who brought us dinners and lunches in the hospital, Lisa. Eilin, Tracy, Kelly and Brenda and thanks to Artie for putting my dad up. We are so appreciative of all the help and good wishes from everyone. I don’t know where we’d be without you all.
Margot
Topics: Progress Reports | Comments Off on April 14, 2005
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