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.