Let me confirm what the latest pictures have been hinting at. The last several days have been pretty darn good ones. The nausea has been completely gone, the bowels are working like they should, and the laughter has been abundant. In fact, as you could tell from some of the pictures, the last two days we were free of the IV pole for a few hours, so we got to go OUTSIDE and check out the playground. It was just what Eli needed to start feeling more like his old self. He is a big time park fan. It was apparent that he wasn’t at 100% as his walking was slower than normal and it was hard for him to get up from a sitting position by himself, but as I told Lacey, “I care more about seeing how well he is doing than dwell on the things that still aren’t better like his walking.” Eli does seem to have a lot of pain in his legs, but he still walks on them several times a day, so that’s good. I have a lot more room to upload photos at http://photos.hornit.net, so keep checking the “Hospital Stay” and Playground albums for new photos. I try to upload a few here as well, but the majority of them will be there because I am limited to 50 photos here on CarePages.
Today was a particularly good day, although it probably won’t end as well as it started. Chemo Round 2 started at about 5:30pm. He’ll be on Vincristine for 1 day, Doxorubicin for 2 days, and Cyclophosphamide for 2 days. So today he’s getting all 3 and tomorrow the Vincristine will drop off. As far as side effects go, they all cause hair loss and nausea (the latter is combated with anti-nausea medicine), but some of the more serious side effects we have to watch for include muscle weakness, loss of reflexes, jaw pain, mouth sores, and blood in the urine. However, if all goes well, they plan to have us out of here and back home this weekend. It’s hard to believe it might actually happen! We have promised Eli that the first night we’re back we’ll camp out in the front yard in a tent. For some reason he really wants to do that and it was his idea. So among the more important things, you can also pray for no rain when we come home. 🙂 To explain why it was a good day today, we had music class with several other little kids on the floor, got to see Clifford the Big Red Dog, and even got to see a real dog that got up on Eli’s bed with him. His name was Stuart and was a really sweet Therapy dog for kids.
Ok, sorry for the short post. I got distracted and now it’s 11:30pm. So far so good, but the first urine test shows there might be blood in Eli’s urine already. I’m not sure how that will affect how they give the chemo, that might mean they stretch it out or it could also mean they speed it up. Either way, they are waiting for another final test to see if they need to take any action. We’ll see what tomorrow brings. For now, we’re thankful for today.
Matthew 6:34 – “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”