This past Monday we went to SickKids for Alice’s first day of her next treatment phase, called consolidation. This phase focuses on treating the CNS to ensure relapse doesn’t occur here, since blood-based treatment doesn’t cross the blood-brain barrier. This treatment requires that Alice go to SickKids for three weeks in a row to have a lumbar puncture and have chemotherapy administered intrathecally into her spine. This means she has to fast and go under for this quick procedure. It means hungry mornings and waiting to be cleared to go for treatment.
However, before they start this phase, Alice’s bloodwork levels have to be high enough and demonstrate recovery from the first phase of treatment. They don’t want to damage her bone marrow too much with treatment, so they want to see that her bone marrow and it’s ability to produce healthy cells have rebounded sufficiently before having to experience additional treatment which further damages it.
So we went in Monday, had her port accessed, they took blood work, and we learned that 2/3 of her key levels had rebounded sufficiently, but one was still too low to begin treatment. So, they sent us home, and we go back on Monday to hopefully start treatment again. It’s been a nice week at home with Alice’s energy levels also picking up. This positive news is tempered by the fact her hair is now more quickly falling out, and she remains a bit tentative on her feet, with her strength still significantly lower than it was before, thanks to the steroids that she’s now off (thank goodness).
In other news, Alice has started homeschooling this week. She’s eligible to recieve 3 hours of at-home instruction. Her home teacher has volunteering to do this, so she comes over twice a week for 1.5 hours each visit to provide 1:1 instruction for Alice. It’s great to have Alice back into her school work with her energy level back up.
As well, we’ve been set up to have the cancer clinic at Credit Valley Hospital in Mississauga be our satellite site for low-risk treatment and other more routine treatments that don’t need to be administered at SickKids to make life a little easier for us. In different phases of treatment in the months to come this will be really helpful for us, to be sure.
Also, Alice lost her first tooth the other day while we were getting some treatment at the day hospital at SickKids. Oh the memories we forge while on this cancer journey!
