Best Laid Plans

I am just not going to tell anyone what I am doing or where I am going to be. It will remove one more layer of guilt because no matter how hard I try, I can not get a fence around this new thing in our lives. I think we will name it Lucinda.

We were ready. I had work organized, I had talked to everyone, I had the milk stopped, I had the garbage handled and we were ready for this very very difficult stage of treatment. We went into the clinic for the blood draw and then we waited for the room number. I read, M-E did homework and we waited some more. (We do lots of waiting.)

The counts came back: platelets doubled, White Blood cells up, Red Blood Cells up and we were ready to go. Then, the ANC was finally reported. 528. Then I argued: but the rest are up. Maybe the ANC is wrong. Maybe you don't need to have 750 to start. WE ARE READY.
Answer to all my pleading and begging: NO, NO, and that would be NO.

We took our matching bags and went home. No Cytoxon, no Ara-C, no Methotrexate, no radiation, no opportunity to use really really expensive anti-nausea drugs. We were sent home and told not to come back until next Monday. Did I not feed her right, did I not make sure she had enough sleep?? Did we not have the right bags? Was it watching the Emmy's and the bad jokes that did it? It is all so much a guessing game.

Okay, try and make the best of it. Early to bed on Monday evening. We get up bright and early on Tuesday, we get out the door and I get almost to the school and realize that I failed to flush her PIIC line. I drop her and wonder why it takes 13 minutes to get to our house from the school and 36 minutes to get to the school from our house. ( I now have stashed heprin in my car and at the school.) I do the medical procedure with a class room of 7th graders watching. The little boy next to M-E looked faint and the one next him looked disappointed that there was no apparent blood and pain involved. I got back into the car and received a call from the Phone Guy. He was going to fix our phone. We have had no less than 4 guy and hours of agony on this issue. I returned home to meet him. There went that day.

I did a couple of errands, tried not to feel guilty about work and then picked up M-E.

The plan for Tuesday afternoon involved going home, dinner, some homework and bed. Now how hard could that be to execute. Well it can be pretty hard to do when Lucinda is around.

She had a bump, a small ugly and hurtful bump on her leg. It was bigger and more painful than this morning. The old Sally would have told her to suck it up. The new Sally, that is going to conquer Lucinda at all cost, called the Hem/Onc client and headed to the hospital.

What a surprise, they don't know what it is. But they have lots of options and lots of ways to find out what it is. They don't like it one bit. They want to go after it with great care.

We are now armed with a huge dose of IV antibiotics, a bunch of little vials of medium that grow lots of nasty bugs injected with M-E's blood and a bunch of huge pills.

We are ready for the new bump what ever it turns out to be. We are hitting it from many angles. It will be dosed and purged we will move forward in full war regalia. But then we might not ever know. And I think that just about says it all.

Sort of like Frederica, who is totally, 100% gone by the way. No trace left. She heard they were coming at her with three doses of spot radiation and she decided not to stick around. I hope she told Lucinda to do the same.