Friday, October 12, 2012

End of Treatment


Wow!!! It didn’t feel like we would ever get here when this journey started over 2 years ago.  We spent lots of time in the Clinic at the hospital, a little time on Unit 1 and lots of time taking medication at home.  Now Karlee has had her last procedure, taken her last chemo through her port and last night took her last oral chemo at home.  She is officially done treatment, but the journey is not over.

She has an appointment on November 22nd to have her port removed and has 3 doses of IV antibiotics remaining.  These will be given during her regular clinic visits which will continue monthly for the next year and then will slowly decrease in frequency until finally it is yearly.  From what we have been told she will have yearly visits to an oncologist forever to ensure that everything stays normal.

Karlee was very excited to finally finish up the chemo at home.  Tonight was the first night without an medication and no restrictions on eating.  She spent all night running to the kitchen and getting snacks.  She was so excited being able to eat after 6pm.  Hopefully this excitement wears off before she gains a bunch of weight.

Last Friday Karlee had her birthday party at Lloyd’s Roller Rink.  She had 7 friends with her as well as Ryley and one of his friends.  She had a great time skating and doing girlie things with everyone.  They ate and were having a great time until it all went wrong.  The girls were going skating before we did cake and presents when Karlee had a good wipe-out at the step onto the rink.  She put up her arms to protect her face and we could see something wasn’t quite right with her arm.  We called the on-call oncologist and he said we could just go to the emergency department at the Children’s and see what was wrong with it.  After a relatively short wait and some x-rays it was determined that she had broken her arm.  She got a very pretty pink cast and we were home by about 10pm.  Today she had her recheck appointment at the hospital and they took off the cast (by having her pull her arm out) and gave her a splint to wear.  The doctor told us this was not the way to put on a cast and we were lucky it stayed on.  She is now in the splint for the next 3-4 week, but can take it off to bath and sleep.

Ryley also managed to spend the last week at home with a case of pink eye.  Unfortunately for him it was the painful version so his eyes were pretty sore and he had a headache for a couple of days.

Hopefully we are done with all this funny stuff and can get back to normal.