Done!

Put this one in the books! Another round of 3F8 complete and we are glad it’s over. It was a pretty rough week as far as pain goes, especially Thursday, but Eli’s recovery each afternoon was fantastic. Very little residual pain and he has been able to play with his buddies at the Ronald McDonald House each night.
The Neuroblastoma team has their weekly meetings on Tuesday and Dr. Kramer apparently said that she wanted to do one more round of 3F8 and then go back to trying the Temodar. At first they were going to wait 8 weeks to do the last round of 3F8, but then they decided we might as well stick to 4 since it’s the last round. Might as well get it done. I suspected that even though she wasn’t originally saying how many rounds of 3F8 she wanted to extend us for, that Dr. Kramer was probably going to let us do “4 more”. Sure enough, that’s what happened. They seem to do 3F8 in 4 round chunks, but not always. Lacey and I are definitely ok with this plan. We feel fortunate to have received a few more rounds of 3F8 while we let his counts recover.

Dr. Cheung was in our room introducing the new Neuroblastoma doctor (Dr. Ellen Basu). Dr. Basu is from the Children’s Hospital Boston and is going to take the place of Dr. Kramer who is leaving Neuroblastoma and switching to ‘all pediatric brain cancers’. So if a Neuroblastoma patient has a spot on the brain, she will still be in charge of the 8H9 protocol for them. Hopefully we will still get to see Dr. Kramer frequently as we really like her a lot (we really like Dr. Modak and Dr. Kushner too, of course).

While he was here, Dr. Cheung took the opportunity to give me the 3rd degree as to why we were doing 3F8 for Eli still. 🙂 I was happy to be able to tell him that we are only doing one more round and that we’d go back to Temodar. That seemed to appease him. However, he was a bit defensive when I asked him what the qualifications for the humanized 3F8 would be (that is coming out in the next few months thanks to funding by the Band of Parents). Honestly, I was only asking because I wanted to know what to tell other parents that I come across, but he immediately said, “He doesn’t qualify, it’s for relapse patients with evidence of disease. He is NED.” 🙂 I laughed and said I was just curious.

We are definitely excited to get home. Separating scans into the week preceding a week of 3F8 makes for a long time away. We are going to be picked up at 3:50am tomorrow to catch a 6am flight home from Newark. Before we go, we’re going to have one more night on the town and do something neither of us have ever done before. We are going to go to an NFL game! Back in April of 2008 I mentioned that we had gone to our first NHL and MLB games in New York and just had MLS and NFL left to scratch off of our list. Tonight we plan to take NFL off of that list of “professional sports we haven’t seen in person” as the Ronald McDonald House is taking a bus full of 60 people to the brand new Jets stadium to see the NY Jets take on the Washington Redskins! There is something extra fun about going to games the first year of a new stadium. We did it for the Mets (Citi Field), the Yankees (Yankee Stadium) and now the Jets. Recession? What recession? These New Yorkers and businesses have PLENTY of money to burn on shiny new entertainment centers! 🙂 We’re going to have a great time. I’ll enjoy the game and Eli will enjoy spending my money on stadium food and hanging out with all of his buddies. 🙂

Thank you for being with us this week on Twitter, Facebook, and of course CarePages. We appreciate all of the support and prayers and it has been great seeing some old friends at the Ronald this trip.