Friday, September 09, 2005

Lots happening in 1 week


Lots happening in 1 week
Originally uploaded by fireater.
Well, we are finally going to start... and start with a bang I may add! Not only will Abby start all of her medications for day one of this new long phase but she will also have a couple surgeries and a spinal tap! Yikes! So pray for next Friday.

So like I said, lots will be going on next Friday! Abby will have multiple doctors working on her for all her various aliments and treatments. Basically we'll check here in at 10am and then at 12 noon it all starts. First Dr. Blinman will take out her Broviac and replace it with a Med-o-port, just a different style access port for taking blood and administering chemo. It will be under the skin instead of a tube hanging out of her... I wonder if she'll miss her little "tube-e"? Next goes Dr. Smith who will do the spinal tap for the start of this long final phase. Finally Dr. King will go , who will do a corrective operation to fix that wandering eye. Actually he'll be doing surgery on both eyes to straighten her all out. Once she comes out of surgery with her new port and straightened eyes (and is awake enough to leave) we'll carry her over to Dr. Smith's office, CHOA, and she'll get an injection of Vincristine. And, if that all wasn't enough, when she gets home she'll start her new phases meds which will include 5 days of Decadron "the grumpy pill" and nightly 6-MP..... Whew that's a lot of stuff!!

So, as you might imagine, we're a bit anxious about all of this stuff but hopefully we'll warm up to it all by next Friday. It actually does make sense to do it all on the same day instead of going down multiple times and it is really nice that she can get her eye done and the Broviac at in one visit! Switching the Broviac to the Med-o-port will be the best for her in the long run, less chance of infection and no tube hanging out of her chest, but it also means that whenever she has to get blood or receive chemo she will have to get an "owee". We don't like the idea of her having to get a needle prick every time we go down to CHOA but also she has had so many blood infections that it just seems like the best thing to do at this time. If we wait until she gets another blood infection she would have to get 2 surgeries, one to take it out and then wait two days for the infection to clear until the Med-o-port could be "installed"... sometimes I feel like my daughter is a car or something, always "looking under the hood" and installing new devices... weird.

Anyway, lots will be going on next Friday. The recovery time is pretty quick for both the eye and the implant and the Decadron is only for 5 days each month... I'm sure I'll really be looking forward to those weeks huh? Who knows, maybe she won't be grumpy or ravenously hungry on such a short dose... I guess we'll find out soon!