In patient treatment, check!

This weekend we finished our fourth and final inpatient treatment for the 'Interim Maintenance' phase that we are in.  This is a 63 day phase that had us in the hospital every other week for about 5 days of treatment.  We can't say enough about how well Sinatra is doing on her chemo. She is so active when we are at the hospital and wants to be out in the hallways all day walking around. All the nurses and Doctors get so excited when she is out walking and she loves 'hamming' it up for them

Sinatra loves walking around the outdoor terrace at the hospital.

.  Sinatra did get sick a few times during her treatment but we continue to give her the anti nausea medicine and it helps out tremendously.  We have about two weeks left in this phase which Sinatra will get an Echo-cardiogram and also oral chemotherapy for half of this time.  We will actually have 10 full days of NOTHING!! Wow, what a crazy thought of not having anything for Sinatra to do.

After this phase we will start our 'Delayed Intensification part 1' phase which is 28 days and followed by another 28 day phase called 'Delayed Intensification part 2'.  We have had all of the chemo that will be given in these phases so are semi familiar with how Sinatra should respond.  The good news is that after these two phases there is only one more 56 day phase before we enter into our 'Maintenance' phase.  We wont get too far ahead of our selves so we will describe Maintenance in a future blog post.

During this phase Sinatra has lost essentially all of her hair. We went through a week where we would be pulling large handfuls of hair  out of her head.  She now has very little left on her head and we expect either the rest to fall out very soon or we may shave it.

Sinatra's Doctor  (Dr. Huynh) came back from maternity leave which was great. We missed Dr. Huynh and are happy to have her back.  All of the Dr's are incredible at CHOC but once you are assigned a Dr and go through some of the initial weeks/months of this treatment you build a bond that is hard to be replaced.