childhood cancer

childhood cancer

Sunday, January 8, 2012

Happy new year

A belated merry Christmas and happy new year.  Having had a lovely break from work and spending lots of time with Luke and Letitia, I launched this week into one of the busiest periods of the year at work (hence continued sporadic blogging).

Luke had a great first Christmas - he enjoyed lots of great presents, and time with Granny, Grandad and Uncle Matthew from Italy.  Unfortuantely Nana and Grandad didnt see too much of him, as my mum was ill from Christmas day, and is only just getting over it.  Being neutropaenic through Christmas and into the new year, we couldn't take any chance with Luke. 

We had two trips to the hospital over the Christmas period.  Once of Christmas evening to hput his NG tube back in.  In what must have been the only ten seconds of the day when Luke wasn't getting at least 100% of someone's attention, he managed to pull the tube out.  It was towards the end of the day though, and while it meant a detour before getting home with him, it wasn't too bad and didn't take long at the hospital (appaently not many people choose Christmas evening to go to A&E).  Then on new year's eve, we needed to get Luke a blood transfusion.  Every numer in the blood count was pretty low, and on the Friday before - heading into another bank holiday weekend, the community team and Addenbrooke's decided that although strictly speaking he didn't quite require a transfusion at that point, his numbers were still decreasing and it would take longer to arrange over the bank holiday.  So, onthe Friday afternoon, we were told that we should go into hospital on Saturday.  We were kind of expecting it - Luke has had four rounds of chemo, and needed blood transfusions after three of them now.  He was so pale, so tired and so lacking in energy.  Within a day of the transfusion, he was much more like his normal self.

We have an MRI on Friday - hopefully the fact it is Friday 13th will have not bearing on anything.  The results from this will determine if the doctors are happy to schedule the next lot of surgery on Luke's back.  If that is the case, we would hope to be having that surgery within a couple of weeks.  I am pretty relaxed about the scan - it will take some distraction tactics as Luke needs a general anaesthetic, so has at least six hours without food to go through, but the last few GAs have been relatively easy to get him through.  The scan is in the morning, so some of the fasting period will be while he is asleep, which will aslo help.  I am, however, getting really tense about the surgery.  It is a bit silly, becuase it isn't even scheduled yet, and it is essentially the same operation he had in August.  But, for whatever reason I am getting very uptight about it.  Hopefully I will get on top of things before too long.

So - Luke is doing well overall.  We have an extra couple of weeks in between chemo sessions because of the surgery, so we are just getting to the point where he is completely over the effects of round four, and for a few weeks we have a perfectly normal feeling boy.  He remains fantastic in terms of how he is dealing with things.  Barring the odd night with disturbed sleep lately (we aren't sure what is waking him) Luke is the model child. 

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