Preschool & Clinic today...higher chemo dose

 First things first...it has been so long since I updated I just have to add that Ty is loving his tumbling class...

 The mini maze at Swore farms...it makes me remember what it was like this time last year...


October 2011, one year ago.  He was in the middle of his most

intense phase of chemo...what a difference! Oct 2012

   Ty got to wear his Halloween costume to preschool this morning!  He LOVES preschool!

 And we took him straight from preschool to his 2:30 clinic appt. at PCMC

 We always stop to throw coins in the fountains out front.  He was very quiet and nervous because this is his first port access on his new port.  It has been several months so he was worried about it.  He kept asking me if 'magic stickers' have pokies in them.  I told him they did but since we put cream on it doesn't hurt.  He was still really nervous.

 He didn't even flinch when she accessed his port.  It didn't hurt at all.  Yay!  His nurse is sooooo good at it, she just pops it right in so he never sees the needle.  And dad had him sufficiently distracted with video games.  Hopefully he won't be so nervous from now on.

 Getting his vincristine...he doesn't care as long as he can play...the visit was so short today that he had to stay a few minutes and play a little more playstation.

 And Batman had to go visit Spiderman of course...and Superman...

His counts shocked us today, they are so high that they doubled his dose of 6mp (the chemo pills he takes) to bring his counts back down to where they want them to be.  They want his ANC to be around 1000 and right now it is 4600!  ANC range for a normal person would be anywhere between 1500 and 8000.  They try to keep his suppressed a little to keep the Leukemia from relapsing.  He was at 25% of the normal dose which is 1/2 pill every other day.  Now he will be at 50% dose which is 1/2 pill every day which means EVERY night is a 6mp night.  He always asks if it is a 6mp night because he knows he can't eat 2 hours before or 1 hour after he takes it (I think that's how it goes) and he can't have ice cream, milk, or orange juice that night.  When we told him it is 6mp night every night now he just said 'okay'.  His maturity surprises me sometimes. 

His oncologist didn't raise his Thursday night pill.  We didn't talk to her after, but I'm guessing that is because just taking his one tiny pill of methotrexate (which is 10% of his original dose) is giving him a rash around his mouth and he even got a couple of small mouth sores from it a couple of weeks ago.  I'm glad they didn't raise that. Here is what his rash looks like:

It is worse on the weekend, Saturday and Sunday and then fades a little bit..but it seems to be a little worse the last couple of weeks.  It doesn't itch or bother him though.
 Hopefully the increase of 6mp will do the trick without crashing his counts.  He will have a CBC in a couple of weeks to make sure it isn't making his counts go too low. 

He also starts his 5 day stint of steroids today.  Boooo

Thank you for dinner!  I'm amazed that people are still bringing us dinner over a year and 1/2 into this!  We got home after dinnertime tonight so it was great that my kids got dinner and we didn't have to worry about it one bit!

He gained some weight!  17.6kg which is 38.7 lbs!  He really is eating pretty good, his favorites right now are german pancakes and PBJ sandwiches.  I'm sure his week of steroids had something to do with his weight gain too.  Counts for my records: WBC 6.7, RBC 3.89, HCT 34.4, PLTS 251, ANC 4.6