Neutropenia blues!

Here is Sinatra at ER with her fever. She would get extremely
mad if we remove her hat!

It has been a while since we updated everyone, and in our case no news usually means good news. We started a new round of treatment, 'Delayed Intensification Part II' two weeks ago. It began with a week of very intense chemo, one of the "study" arms of treatment we are on, which consisted of five straight days of 6-8 hour long infusions at the Outpatient Center. She made it through the week like champ and seemed like she was feeling pretty good considering how intense the treatment was, and then 3 days later it all went down hill.

We had a rude awakening on 8/20 Wednesday night, when she started doing her whimpering cry which usually means she is about to spike a fever. This will happen when she has had chemo that will take her counts down to zero (AKA Neutropenic, is what they call it medically). She did this off an on the entire night but never actually got a fever. We were shocked, but relieved that she made it through. We had an appointment at the clinic for labs the next day in the morning at 9am and we told our nurse about what happened. The labs confirmed that Sinatra needed blood and were supposed to come back at 3pm the same day for a blood transfusion (number 10 or so since we have been in treatment).  At noon we got a call from Grandma Gloria that she was running a fever of 102 degrees and it was going up fast. After a chat with our Oncologist we were headed the the ER once again.

Here is Sinatra at the hospital.  The only thing she wants to
eat is Fruit Roll Ups. Literally 20 of them in two days!

Now here we are 4 days into being admitted in the hospital and Sinatra is still Neutropenic. The good news is the chemo clearly worked and knocked everything out, meaning her blood making factory was completely shut down. The problem now is that it's taking a while for it to start producing again. Until we start to see her counts come back up or "recover", we aren't going anywhere. So now we wait each day for labs that are taken in the early morning to tell us if we have made any progress. What's hard about this is that we have no idea when things will turn around. Could be another day, 5 more or 10 more.

The hospital stay this time has been a little trickier for us because Link started his new job at Amazon last week so things aren't quite as flexible yet since he's brand new. We also just moved into the new house just barely a week ago and things are still an absolute mess. We have decided to focus on spending time with the girls and not worry to much about all of the other chaos.

On the bright side, hopefully after this recovery, Sinatra's counts shouldn't get this low again. We are about 60 days from starting the final phase of treatment called Maintenance. We are literally counting the days, well sort of, because its certainly possible that we might encounter another delay. Thanks for taking the time to read this. We will let you all know when we come home.