First Delay and Maybe A Cold

This morning Karlee had her CBC at the South Calgary Lab.  The lab was empty this morning so she actually got in early – first time that has happened!  JoJo was off today so Greg called us with the results around 1pm.  Karlee is still neutropenic as her ANC has dropped down to 300.  All her other counts were in the normal range.  Due to the low ANC Karlee has now been delayed as she is not allowed to start the next phase of treatment until her ANC is over 750.  There isn’t much we can do to get her ANC up other than encouraging her to sleep and rest enough and eat a balanced diet; basically everything that she should be doing anyway.  So instead of starting the 2nd interim maintenance phase tomorrow she is now waiting until next Monday to again have another CBC.  If her counts are up at that point she will start on Tuesday February 8th.  This now pushes us to starting maintenance into April.  It is hard to believe that we wound now be in maintenance if they hadn’t added 2 months to the protocol late last year.

With Karlee being neutropenic she is again under house arrest.  Thankfully we don’t have a lot planned this week so staying home shouldn’t be a big deal.  The one issue we are going to run into is the weather is supposed to start to warm up and Karlee is going to want to get out and play.

Karlee seems to be developing a little bit of a cough and it looks like she might be coming down with a cold.  It will be interesting to see what happens now since she is allowed to have almost no medicine.  If she spikes a fever we will probably be headed for admission to the unit.  Hopefully she can fight this off and stay out of the hospital!

The Skate-A-Thon is still going ahead strong.  We are looking for additional kids to get pledges and come out and skate.  We are also looking for donations of prizes for both kids and adults to be used as give aways for the top fund raisers and for draws.  If you are interested in skating or donating let us know (ronlewis@telusplanet.net).  You don’t need to be from the community to participate in the fundraiser.  Thank you to everyone who is getting behind this and making it an incredible event.