Normal week??

Well, it's been about a week since the last post where I reported that Tim was really tired. He's recovered a lot since then and has been in for another round of vincristine this last Thursday. Remarkably, his blood counts are looking pretty good. He has also been feeling a lot better this week and has been able to participate in band events in the evenings.

The Boise area has been experiencing poor air quality with several red alerts issued and stage 1 alerts as well. This has impacted after school events and several day's worth were cancelled. However, we were able to go see Tim and the marching band perform their opening at last Friday's football game halftime. It was well done. Tim doesn't march on the field but plays a tuba sitting in the pit. From where we were in the stands, it sounded really sweet and between Tim and the two marching tubas, that part of the score had an expanded presence. It was really nice to see how the school, and in particular the band instructor have been able to accommodate Tim. He continues to remain enthusiastic and positively focused on school activities.

This week we will meet with the school counselor to discuss classifying Tim as a 504 student. This will recognize his reduced capacity for this year and allow the school to make reasonable accommodations for him. He'll still take the full course load but may not have to complete all the busy work assigned. Perhaps just demonstrate that he knows the material to move on. We'll get more details this Wednesday.

More and different side effects showed up this past week. He has some acne developing (a recognized side effect) but this seems to already be under control with topical over the counter treatment. His voice continues to sound hoarse, the finger tips and toes are tingly and numb, and from time to time balance seems to be an issue.

This coming weekend, Tim and I will take a trip to see his brother at U of I in Moscow, ID. Tim should be on the recovery by then. Blood counts and in particular his white cell counts are supposed to rebound this week. In fact they are supposed to be at their low point right around now. But he got a good report last Thursday and no indication that more tests needed to be done early this week.

Maybe we have some silver lining showing through and his bone marrow is pretty good at taking the hit each time from the chemo.

Could this have been a (new) normal week?