Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Taxol is taxing

Anna was supposed to get chemo last Tuesday, but wasn't allowed. Her white blood cell count was apparently almost nonexistant, so the oncologist said she would have to wait a week. This didn't make Anna very happy. Yesterday, however, we were good to go. Not without stress, mind you. Anna did her best to stay locked at home, away from germs. She ate healthy stuff. Then Silas became sick with a cold. Silas was jettisoned out to the living room to sleep, thus Daddy was jettisoned as well. Then Daddy got... yeah, of course Daddy got sick. So now after carefully quarantining herself from the rest of the germ-filled world around her, the germs found Silas and I and got in anyway. We tried hard to not get too close, obviously not sleep in the comfy bed, and not cough, sneeze, or drool on or around her (I'm bad with the drool rule). Problem is, when Daddy is left to do all of the caring for the baby, the baby notices his inadequacies and capitalises on making everything twice as hard for him. Anna, unamused, often had to step in and show me "how it's done." It was at each of those points that, like a Rube Goldberg design, Silas would sneeze his mouthful of pureed baby food on her, she would shriek in horror, recoiling and almost falling out of her chair, and finally shoot me a look that said, "you're a moron. Why didn't I marry and have a child with a good-looking pediatrician?"

Worry not-- somehow, by some divine intervention, Anna (up to this point) has made it through unscathed, and was able to get her chemo treatment yesterday. And at least if she does get sick, she has about a week-and-a-half to get better. She now has only two more treatments before a short two week break, and six or seven weeks of radiation. I can't wait for her to be done with this.

The doctor is trying to figure out if it was a virus that initially caused her white blood cell count to plummet, or if she crashed from the Taxol (her new chemo drug). Yesterday's session will be the benchmark, as it were, wherein we discover if it happens again. If so, the doctor said she would likely need to be hospitalised and given fluids and other fun drugs, and she would have to go weekly to chemo instead, getting smaller amounts with each weekly visit. Anna would prefer to keep doing it in one large dose-- just get the damned thing over with and move on. I'm with her.