Today was our first clinic visit. Jayne needed to get a lumbar puncture, a bone marrow aspiration, a few blood draws, and a thorough tour of an exam room. I feel like the latter is required for any visit to a clinic. You can't truly be cured of what ails you until you have intimate knowledge of the ten by ten the doctor/nurse/medical professional is going to be, eventually, evaluating and treating you in. I digress.
After we spent a few minutes in the oncology and blood diseases waiting room, we took his vitals, got a blood draw, and were shown to our exam room. Jayne took some time ripping up the paper cover on the exam bed, which was quite important, and playing with his dad by taking turns doing raspberries. He was a happy little guy. About then, we got word that his ANC was 1150, a good sign that his body was recovering well from the chemo, and that, pending the results of his aspiration, we would most likely be re-admitted into the hospital next Wednesday.
After touched base with our AML doctor, we moved over the hospital proper to get his two draws. Jayne, of course, impressed all the nurses with his push ups and planks, not to mention a few smiles here and there. It's hard to imagine anyone not falling in love with my little guy at first sight. He's just so damned happy, always very calm, and he never has much to complain about, even given his trying circumstance. That being said, the anesthesiologist did manage to scare the crap out of him, inadvertently, so it was a good thing Shay and I were there when he was being put under.
Most of the details following that aren't really noteworthy, but the results of the tests themselves will prove to be. The aspiration that he got is what is going to determine, in the long and short run, when we are going back into the hospital and whether or not he will need a bone marrow transplant. The point of the aspiration, the extraction of his bone marrow, is to calculate the percentage of cancer bursts still present after the first round of chemotherapy. The tricky bit is that, at a glance, cancer bursts very closely resemble new growth bursts. So, as one can imagine, it can be a bit tricky figuring out just how effecting the chemo was, especially when Jayne's wee body is recouping this well. So, while a number below the threshold will definitely flag him as low risk for a flair up later on, a number above the threshold could actually just be a false positive for him being high risk.
Low risk, 3 more sessions of chemo and then home free, quite literally.
High risk, 3 more sessions of chemo and then a bone marrow transplant.
If the numbers are tight, we will have to do another aspiration next Wednesday and so we won't be admitted back into the hospital until the next week. As much as I would like to say that Shay and I would love another week of being able to meander around in our underwear, not having to tango with IV stands, and generally live as close to a normal life as possible right now, we both agree that the preferable outcome is that we get back in and get all of this over with in as little amount of time as is realistic. Right now, it seems like such a cruel, unending sentence of treatment, pain, discomfort, and prodding. To put things in perspective, though, our neighbor in recovery was a young man with bone cancer who had to have his pelvis, femur, and knee replaced with prosthesis. He'd been in and out of the hospital for years and his body was still fighting itself. It's hard watching my son go through such terrible circumstances, to be ill, to be miserable, to be poked and prodded seemingly without end. But he's lucky, he's still growing at a normal pace, still developing his personality and physical abilities on par with any other child. I cannot imagine being a parent and having to watch your child go through something as drastic as major prosthesis, radiation sickness, years within a hospital, and that's just naming a few of the hardships that the other occupants of the oncology/hematology endure.
We're lucky that science has progressed in the past 25 years that we can say, with very little doubt, that, sure he has leukemia, but he'll be fine. I don't have any naive notions about a penultimate cure for "cancer" but I can appreciate just how diligent the people in this field are in ensuring that every man, woman, and child with any form of cancer have a fighting chance, not just to recover, not just to leave the antiseptic confines of their hospital room, but to, once again, be normal. To feel normal. So, thank you, each and every one of you whose day to day goal is the treatment and research of cancer, in whatever form it may take. You saved my son's life, along with millions of other sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, friends, and complete strangers. You guys rock, around the clock.
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