Interim Maintenance 1 Clinic Visits

I apologize for the big space between posts. It's been pretty busy here. I've been substituting on some paper routes (which happens at 1am, so my days are really groggy), and we're preparing to move to a bigger apartment 15 minutes northward (which will happen this weekend).  Here's what happened since the last post:
 

Molly decided to explore the clinic room this time. She found out how the water works!

We finally got some good labs on February 19th, which let us go in to start the next round of chemo on the 20th. That was a total of 4 weeks delayed. I took Molly in and she did really good with everything. She remembered what to do when each doctor came in. The Child Services gal came in and Molly immediately asked for the baby doll and play doctor stuff to play with. The nurse came in to draw blood and Molly got her port cap ready for the nurse to clean. Then the Oncologist (the one that came to see us the very first night in the ER in November) came in and Molly immediately shrunk into herself and hung her head the whole time he checked her out (I don't think she likes him that much, though he's very very nice). After being checked out by the doctors, we went back to the infusion room and had vincristine and methotrexate pumped into Molly's port, and then got to go home!

On March 1st we had another clinic appointment. Everything was just like the first visit of this phase, except they are raising the dose of methotrexate each visit. Molly doesn't really get any side effects from the medicine except for an incontinence issue we have for a couple days after each clinic visit. I asked the nurse about it and she said she can't think of any patient having that problem, so it may just be something that has to do with Molly reacting emotionally to the visits.

March 11th was the next clinic visit. Same drill, same medicine, increased dose on methotrexate. One of the side effects of methotrexate is decreased appetite, but Molly has been eating pretty well so far. It's only about one meal a day that she doesn't want to really eat.

Our next appointment is on March 21st. Molly has vincristine and methotrexate into her port again, and they are also going to do methotrexate into her spine with a lumbar puncture in the RTU. We've been spoiled the last few visits because they were so short, but this next visit will be around 4 hours long.

Molly's hair was growing back, but now it's thinning out again because of the vincristine. We have two more clinic visits with vincristine doses this phase, and then looking forward 9 doses periodically between the middle of April to the middle of July. After that she's pretty much done with that drug and her hair can start to grow back.

P.S.

Please comment if you have anything to say or if you have any additional questions about the post above you would like answered