Two More Down

Well, two more of the Icky Chemos are over!  Hooray.  That means only 2 more cycles (or 4 days) of this one until the finish line.  Love that thought.

I've been okay this round - very tired so I went to bed super early last night & felt good this morning.  Around 10 when I got to chemo I started to feel pukey again but they hooked me right up with drugs & now I feel tired again but I did manage to eat some leftovers for lunch. 

My blood work wasn't too good this time.  WARNING:  Bunch of boring medical information coming... I did learn a lot more about what they are looking at thought - 3 primary things - 1) white count (the important part of this is the nutrophylls I've mentioned before), 2) platelets and 3) red count. 

I haven't really had any issues with white count except when I had the appendix issue - normally its pretty fair & that is helped significantly by the Neulasta shots (those $7,000 shots I get after every cycle).  Yesterday my white count was 5.2 & my Nutrophylls were 4.27 - both very acceptable numbers.

Platelets are the tough one.  They can transfuse platelets (I had a platelet transfusion when I went to surgery for the appendix) but they don't live very long in the body - only up to 72 hours.  So the transfusion doesn't really help much after the chemo cycle which is when the platelets drop off.  In adult patients they require platelets above 100 to do treatment.  Its really 100,000 but they shorten it to 100.  In pediatric patients & people like me on pediatric regimes, this number is reduced to 75.  So as long as my platelets are above 75, I can get the treatment.  Yesterday mine were 83 - they were down in the 30s when I had my surgery.  So this is really the biggest area of concern in terms of potentially causing treatment delays in the home stretch.

Finally, red count - they tend to look at the PCV number which represents hematocrit (not sure what those mean).  But if it gets to 25 then you need a transfusion.  Mine was 26 yesterday.  Based on this Dr Keedy opted to have me come in next Thursday to check all my blood work & most likely have a 2 unit transfusion.

Bad part about this, I was supposed to go to Las Vegas next week for an exciting meeting with one of our big builder customers.  I'm pretty bummed about not going, but I wouldn't want to be out there & run into health issues that far from home, so I'm okay with the safe approach.  I just feel like I'm letting my colleagues and customers down, but I don't know what I can do about that?

We had a fun Monday night when the Boyds brought us dinner.  They actually like to bring stuff & cook it here & eat with us which is always really fun.  We laugh a lot - Eriana works very hard to keep us entertained.  She's learning some new songs & associated motions at Beginning Broadway camp this week so its fun to watch her practice them.  She has a show on Friday at 11.15 which I'm pretty excited about.  Have to task EB with getting the video camera functioning so we can share her performance!

So, now the official tally stands at 4.5/7 rounds completed which equates to 9 of 14 cycles or 30 of 49 total days of treatment.  In other terms, I have 2.5 rounds left, 5 cycles or 19 more treatments.  The number of treatments one is what I focus on.

We have had lots of rain since my last post, which is a relief to everybody - we were desperate!!!

For photo therapy, a few very random blast from the past pics!

a tiny eriana on a pony ride, not sure when this was

emilia at our hanceville plant around 2008

both girls a couple spring breaks ago - yes that is a live alligator baby she is holding

me & my brother last octoboer in palm beach - this one makes me realize how different i look now