Last Treatment This Week!

This Friday will be Tim’s last chemo treatment. Hopefully the Aloxi/Zofran combo will work for the nausea and he’ll just have the normal two-three day recovery where he’s just tired. Then the high school graduation ceremony is on Thursday. Even with the one week total delay, he should still be able to attend graduation. It is such an exciting time to be done with chemo and be graduating from high school.

Following in future weeks, we’ll have to schedule the removal of the port and Tim will have to have a series of MRI scans to be jointly shared among the oncologist, radiation oncologist and neurosurgeon. Over the last year, the syrinx hasn’t shown up on CT scans but we have to go back and look closely with MRI rather than CT scans to see if the syrinx is gone, hence the reason to involve the neurosurgeon again. Hopefully, the syrinx is gone. Tim still remains symptom free in that regard.

The port removal will be an outpatient surgery similar to the kind used to put it in. A few internal stitches and some super-glue and he should be good to go.

The port of course is necessary since the chemo drugs would corrode a small vein. The port actually goes in through the jugular vein and almost all the way to the heart where lots of volume quickly dilutes the drugs. The port requires preparation to use by pushing saline through to clear the line and then when the port is de-accessed to again flush it and leave a heparin mix behind in the line. This process is most distasteful to Tim since that quick saline push and the heparin instantly cause him to have a metallic taste in his mouth. It goes away quickly, but every time it’s there. We’ve used all sorts of masking candy from sour worms to Skittles to Mike ’n Ikes. Recently though Tim has been able to just get through the taste since it is short lived. He really doesn’t like any of those candies anymore.

However, I am happy to report that he’s eating ice cream again. For a long time, he wasn’t thrilled with ice cream and avoided it, but perhaps there has been additional improvement in his taste recovery. The last several treatment spaces he has been trying to add some weight and has been at least successful in maintaining weight. He thinks this week he’ll be a few pounds up.

And he now has a wisp of hair. Very light and very thin but it’s there. We expect it to fall out once more but it’s a good sign that his hair wants to come back quickly. Hopefully in 4 weeks or so after the last round of chemo, the hair will start to come in again.

Tim’s bone marrow will also appreciate the end of chemo. His ability to produce blood cells has been depressed for so long. Even using Neulasta to increase white cell production, the bone marrow is just burned out. He’ll get one more dose of Neulasta to try and minimize the number of days where his neutrophil count is zero. That’s about all it does now. So starting next week, we’ll work on nutrition to rebuild.