Thursday, February 24, 2005
Round 2, Day 3: The Scoop
Our oncologist, Dennis Kuo, came in today and gave us a full background on the plan for Jacob's treatment - upshot: I feel a million times better knowing what's what and Jacob is well and truly bummed (but beginning to adjust, or at least commencing to begin.) you'll see why in a minute.
The scoop is, he'll have an MRI after round four of the chemo, and if it's clear of visible cancer, we'll move on to the stem cell transplant. If not, he'll have two more rounds and check again.
The cells will have already been harvested from Jacob's blood in a painless process called "aphaeresis" which Dennis says takes about the amount of time of two romantic comedies or one epic saga type movie. That will happen soon, in the next few weeks.
After the last chemo, we wait for his blood counts to recover, and then check into the hospital. He gets a week or so of very high dose chemo, and then when all the last remaining bad guy cells have been wiped out, he'll get his own stem cells back.
Then the hard part starts: those stem cells are essentially seedlings that have to regrow his entire immune system, which will have been entirely destroyed. For the next three to four weeks he'll be in isolation in the hospital while they "engraft," i.e. get down to business. There are quite a few risks during that period, but Jacob is tough and the team here at Packard is great, so I'm sure he'll make it.
But here is the part that bummed Jacob out: after he gets out of the hospital there will be another 100 days of isolation at home. In fact it won't even actually be at home, because we have to be within 20 minutes of the hospital, meaning we'll probably move to the peninsula for the summer. Friends will be able to visit, as long as they are completely healthy, wash their hands etc. And he'll be able to walk out side in areas away from the public, but no restaurants, movie theaters, airplanes etc. As Jacob said, "there goes my whole summer!"
All that said, Jacob had actually a pretty great day, including a stroll downstairs (actually down-elevator) to the cafeteria, sitting up in a chair to play World of Warcraft and eating take-out Chinese food for dinner. He's up for very short visits and phone calls. We'll be here until monday.
The scoop is, he'll have an MRI after round four of the chemo, and if it's clear of visible cancer, we'll move on to the stem cell transplant. If not, he'll have two more rounds and check again.
The cells will have already been harvested from Jacob's blood in a painless process called "aphaeresis" which Dennis says takes about the amount of time of two romantic comedies or one epic saga type movie. That will happen soon, in the next few weeks.
After the last chemo, we wait for his blood counts to recover, and then check into the hospital. He gets a week or so of very high dose chemo, and then when all the last remaining bad guy cells have been wiped out, he'll get his own stem cells back.
Then the hard part starts: those stem cells are essentially seedlings that have to regrow his entire immune system, which will have been entirely destroyed. For the next three to four weeks he'll be in isolation in the hospital while they "engraft," i.e. get down to business. There are quite a few risks during that period, but Jacob is tough and the team here at Packard is great, so I'm sure he'll make it.
But here is the part that bummed Jacob out: after he gets out of the hospital there will be another 100 days of isolation at home. In fact it won't even actually be at home, because we have to be within 20 minutes of the hospital, meaning we'll probably move to the peninsula for the summer. Friends will be able to visit, as long as they are completely healthy, wash their hands etc. And he'll be able to walk out side in areas away from the public, but no restaurants, movie theaters, airplanes etc. As Jacob said, "there goes my whole summer!"
All that said, Jacob had actually a pretty great day, including a stroll downstairs (actually down-elevator) to the cafeteria, sitting up in a chair to play World of Warcraft and eating take-out Chinese food for dinner. He's up for very short visits and phone calls. We'll be here until monday.
# posted by Ann @ 9:06 PM 
