Last Dose

John's chemo was supposed to be Monday and Tuesday, but there was a communication error in scheduling, so we ended up getting the chemo today and tomorrow.  It worked out great though, we were able to spend Tuesday celebrating Daniel's first birthday.

Scans are scheduled for mid-June.  Next appointment with the doctor is end of June.  At that time, we can take out his port if we want.  The feeding tube is staying in until he can eat 2000 calories by mouth.  Up until John gets over this dose of chemo nobody has worried too much about his nutrition.  Everybody has just worried about him getting any calories at all.  Now we are going to try to get a nutritionist to write a meal plan to help John recover better.  Hopefully, it's all food I can cook for him

Long-term side effects that we discussed with the NP today are that he should return to his normal self, but aged 10 years.  John has had neurapathy in his fingers and toes; the NP thinks he might get most, if not all, of his feeling back.  John still has crazy sweating and chills that nobody has figured out a cause for yet.  Hopefully we can get that figured out sooner, rather than later.  It keeps John from getting good sleep.  The NP thinks that John's dizziness will go away when chemo goes away. She thinks his taste will come back eventually.

The boys have just started asking, "When is dad going to stop being sick?"  So this is a good time for this last dose! 

No Fever!

Thank you everyone for your prayers!  John did not get a fever last week!  He got his half-day of chemo on Monday (vincristine) and then was able to stay home all week.  He was pretty exhausted and a little nauseaus, but overall it was a good week.  He felt best when we went out for drives.  For those who know John pretty well, he loves to find best prices and coupon stack.  Not many deals are worth doing that for, but he found two awesome deals this past week, so we spent one day getting our Staples' deals.  We spent another going to a couple different Lowe's.  We drove up the canyon one day and to Eureka another. Daniel was really nice to us even though we kept him in his car seat so much!

Last time John was in the hospital for his overnight chemo, we met with Dr. Poppe (the radiation oncologist).  He came to John's room instead of having us come downstairs to his office.  He said that he would double check next time we go to his office, but he is pretty confident that the dose of radiation to John's saliva glands was low enough that John should regain use of his saliva glands.  One of John's problems with eating has been his dry mouth.  When John reads about radiation to neck and mouth, he has found some patients whose saliva glands start working after a few weeks, some whose come back after a couple months, or a couple years, or never.  So that was nice to hear the doctor say John's might come back soonish.

This week is John's week off.  Next week he will go back in for his last four doses of chemo (the overnight stay).  It will take probably 10 -14 days to get over the chemo effects.  It also can take a couple weeks for the chemo to finish its job, so the scans will be some time in June to find out for sure if we are done with chemo!