All Done Antifungal!!

Spaceship ride...this picture gets to be first because his CT scan showed that his lungs are almost all the way clear which means he is done with voriconazole!!  Yay!  There are a few reasons to celebrate...the first one of course is that the medicine worked and cleared his lung fungus. (Mostly, she said there was one little spot left but they aren't worried about it too much I guess)  Granted it took longer than we thought it would but we are grateful it worked. 
The side effects of the antifungal weren't horrendous but they were annoying enough that we are glad to be rid of it.  The sensitivity to the sun being #1, bye bye red skin and random blisters.  Picking up a $900 bottle of antifungal every 6 days that has to be pre-ordered because no pharmacy in town carries it was kind of a pain...(but makes us extra extra thankful for good insurance, a good pharmacy who bent over backward trying to find him some when their supplier was out, and a $12 copay).  His dosage worried me a little too, it seemed to be really high, 240mg (6ml) twice a day and the bottle came with a 5ml dose syringe, but that is the dose he needed to get the job done.
 I won't have to greet him each morning with his dose and hear "I'm hungry" (it was supposed to be given on an empty stomach twice a day, no food an hour before or after... have you ever noticed that telling someone they can't have food makes them want it even more?..the ironic thing about that is after he had his dose he wasn't really hungry anymore for a while, I think it made him feel kind of sick, and made him throw up occasionally)
That was probably way more details about voriconazole than anybody wanted to read, but I'm quickly learning how forgetful I am so I like to write everything down,..someday we will read this again and remember all of the reasons we didn't like Vfend. (and the one reason we did like it)
 I am hoping that his appetite will increase a little as well, his weight is 15.9kg (35lbs), same as last month I think so he didn't gain any weight and he is 96cm tall.  Just putting that in there while I'm remembering.  He was 92cm tall at diagnosis...and weighed 16.9kg (37lbs). 

 Throwing his coins in at the entrance

 Stepping on his bug he made in the waiting room, he was bouncing off the walls today!  We missed daddy's video game distraction techniques a lot!

 He did get to play a little bit of gamecube, but not much cause he only needed an infusion of vincristine, which takes less than 15 minutes.

 Holding his IV spot so it will stop bleeding while the nurse gets the bandaid

The giant 'fish tank' I mentioned, you can see the fish from inside the elevators...this is the view from the other side.

In his own little lair on the way home, all set with his drinks, video, blanky in the window to block the sun and snacks on the side.  He talked and talked all the way home, asking if he will have a beard when he is old and how old he will be when he is a dad, if Jesus is strong enough to lift a car,  if he could buy some skittles for his cousin, what makes cars old, wondering how people fall in love and then giggling and saying 'kissing them?' under his breath when I said you find someone who you want to be with all the time and want to hug them and kiss them, 'tricking' me that he wanted to only watch a black screen and then secretly turning pink panther back on, commenting that his cousin could get sick like him cause he's 4 too, and wondering if he could have both pokie prizes even though he only got one pokie, (I told him yes of course since he held really still for the IV ninjas, they were impressed).
 He also asked the other day if our new (to us) car can go even faster than the 'bazuki' (our 1992 suzuki swift that is falling apart at the seams, it is old, loud, and stickshift which must make it sound fast to a kid) he is shocked that anything could be as cool and fast as the bazuki.

It was a good visit all around!
No steroids again : ) He will probably start back up on steroids at his October appointment, we hate those things, but we are glad he can go back on them eventually because they should increase his chances of not relapsing.  (he has been off of them because fungal infections love steroids)  His chemo pill dosage stays the same which means we only have to do 1/2 6mp (another that should be taken on an empty stomach and with no milk) every other night, his one MTX pill on Thursdays and dapsone and colace every night.  So Easy!!  He is also cleared (as long as his counts stay where they are) to go camping and to start tumbling back up this fall.  He will get a new port placed in his chest in October the same time he gets his back poke so that will be in the OR instead of sedation.  I'm glad we have a couple of months before that happens cause he will be sore while the insertion sites heal and even though it is so routine, it scares me a little now that we've had problems with one.

Counts today looked great!  WBC 3.2, RBC 4.36, HGB 12.8, HCT 38.5, PLTS 247, ANC 1300.  White blood count and ANC are just a little below the 'normal' range which is good, they are supposed to be suppressed a little.  I'm sure if they go much higher than that we will be looking at increased chemo pill doses.  But for now we are good!

Thank you for dinner! Yum!