Short detour

A slight detour again in the last week. Abigail unfortunately spiked a fever at 8pm last Thursday, so it was back to hospital for another week. This time though it was just to get some IV antibiotics and to undergo closer monitoring. Fortunately, the fever spike was not long-term and after the first night she was fine. The hospital stay had to continue until she was making some neutrophils, hence the week long admission.

Thankfully nothing additional was picked up on our brief trip through the Emergency department. At the time every available space had a bed with a coughing/vomiting/clearly unwell kid in it. Not exactly the best place to be without neutrophils in your blood. Luckily a bed in oncology opened up quickly, so we were only there for 4 hrs or so rather than the 15 they had told us to expect.

Her blood counts are now rising, showing that her bone marrow is recovering from the last round of chemo. Touch wood this should mean that we can stay home until her transplant in a couple of weeks. In the meantime she will still be going back and forwards to the outpatient clinic to get a whole heap of pre-transplant work-ups. However, day trips to the clinic are far more preferable than admissions to the ward, so at this point we'll take that.

Uno, dos, tres. Round three finished.

Another 5 days of intensive chemo and Abi is back home again, being far ahead of schedule as is becoming typical for her. Just one week in hospital, we were told to expect at least 3 weeks if not 4. She is one tough little girl. Another trip to hospital in the coming days is probably inevitable as we are expecting a fever spike, but perhaps not. Either way we have another few precious days at home.

This time around she suffered some pretty high fevers, hitting 40 degrees on Thursday night. This landed her in an intensive care bed for a day. After this she developed an itchy rash all over, whether from the antibiotics to combat the fever or the chemo we just don't know. Unfortunately this lead to another couple of nights without much sleep due to the itching. This explains the pic above as she was pretty tired watching TV (Diego), note that she is also smothered in calamine lotion, hence the white patches in the photo to the left. On the right we'd switched to sorbelene cream, the slicked back hair is not her new style. Her blood has been pretty good throughout this, receiving only a batch of red blood cells this time around (so far).

In true form she handled all of this very well, and was soon back to her usual self. This routine now includes not letting the nurses take her temperature unless she gets the thermometer out of their pocket first. She also tells them which arm/leg the BP cuff has to go on and insists on placing the pulse/oxygen meter or her toe/finger herself. With doctors, as in the pic on the right, she won't them listen to her chest until she has used the stethoscope on them or her teddy first.

This concludes the initial rounds of chemo, and the good news is that she has remained in remission and is thus on track. The next step is a bone marrow transplant from her sister at the end of August. This will give her the best chance of a complete cure. It is riskier as the drugs are much stronger, which is why they do the transplant at the end of 8 days treatment that will essentially destroy all of her marrow (and thus any residual leukaemia). The donor cells are then implanted to get her immune system back up and running faster and enable her to begin making her own blood products. This reduces the period where she will be extremely vulnerable to infection, so she will be in strict isolation until her system is back up and running. The stay in hospital following transplant will be 6-18 weeks. A pretty big mountain left to climb, but hopefully that will be the last one with only check-ups after that.

Ready for round 3

Great news again this week as Abigail's blood work began recovering from the chemo on its own. So, no transfusions or platelets needed since the last post. Her platelet count is now above 800 (it was as low as 10) and her haemoglobin is rising again. She has also not had fevers and is finally free of that pesky cough. All this means that trips to the hospital have been kept to a minimum and, knock on wood, we won't have to go back until Wednesday when Round Three starts. She is in the best health she has been since all this began; next round of chemo will be the toughest she has had, so this is all in her favour.

The new house is much more kid friendly, with a bit of a 'circuit' track around the two hall ways that lets both kids run lap after lap of the house, accompanied by Disney soundtracks and lots of laughing. They love doing this and it has become a regular after dinner passtime. Both girls also enjoy riding their bikes/trikes on flat concrete, rather than the more challenging 45 degree slope we had in the last place. It has been a relatively mild winter thus far so this has also been popular in the last week. Lots of energy for such a little girl, puts mum and dad to shame!