Round 2 Dose 2

Yesterday morning Mom went in to the infusion center to have her second dose of this second round of chemotherapy. She was rather anxious after her experience three weeks ago of becoming violently ill after her initial dose of this new chemo. The Thursday before she and Dad met with Dr Kenyon, the oncologist, to discuss if Mom would go ahead with this course of treatment. Dr. Kenyon asked her, "What do I have to say to convince you to go ahead?" The three of them then proceeded to have a conversation about all the very convincing reasons Mom needs to do this second round of chemo. Most important, is that the survival statistics are better for women with inflammatory breast cancer who follow this specific course of treatment. They also discussed how the medications could be adjusted to hopefully reduce the nausea and other ill effects.





This brings us back to yesterday. I understand that Mom was pretty anxious during the infusion process. When she came home she was able to sleep. Around 3:30 she started to feel sick. Dad applied some of the "magic 4" topical anti-nausea medication. This medication instead of making her feel less noxious, caused her to have hallucinations and become rather paranoid and out of her head. She also developed a rash on her face. Dad called the doctor and struggled with their slow response. Three hours later he was able to talk to an on call doctor who recommended a course of action using some of the medications on hand.





The report I have from Dad this morning is that the night went pretty well. Mom's nausea has stayed at a 3 or a 4 on scale of 1 to 10. Dad says that she is also no longer out of her head, though she is still anxious and troubled.





Aside from all of this, today is my daughter Maya's 8th birthday. Steve, the kids, and I are traveling up to Portland to go to the zoo. We had our family celebrations earlier knowing that today would not be a great day around the house because of the chemo schedule. We are going to try to have a special day out and about. But, because I will be away most of today, I wanted to get the word out to our community about Mom's second dose.





I hope that this day is not too hard on her. I hope that the medications are able to keep the nausea at a low level, while not making her feel like she is going crazy.

Let me explain the pictures before I end this posting. Two of them are from our Sunday school Da Vinci days art project. We made super heroes. Elias is in the "courage" super hero and Maya is in the "love" super hero. Then there is a picture of Elias as the Mona Lisa. The last picture is of Maya's little birthday tea party.

More later,


Emily