Maintenance

I can’t believe how long it has been since I posted anything.  I guess that means we are starting to fall into “The New Normal.”

Karlee has been on Maintenance for a little over 2 weeks now and everything is going very well.  She takes oral chemo each night at least 2 hours after eating.  We are doing this at night about 8pm.  It is difficult telling Karlee she can’t have anything to eat after 6pm, but she is starting to understand.  She gets 1 6MP pill each night and Tuesday nights she gets an additional 5.5 MTX pills.  We haven’t pushed her to start swallowing the pills, but she just chews them up and follows it up with a drink of apple juice.  She still gets Septra twice a day 3 days a week and she is now on steroids for the first 5 days of each monthly cycle.  It is nice only going to the hospital once a month, but taking the meds at home is a different challenge.

One of the interesting issues we ran into was the lack of Septra at the hospital pharmacy.  We have always had this prescription filled at the hospital as we were told it was a compound prescription and can be difficult to find the components at other pharmacies.  Last time Karlee was in we tried to get it filled and were told they had been out for a few weeks and didn’t have an estimate of when it would be back in stock.  We had a couple of weeks supply so we figured we would wait it out and hope they got more in.  This week we knew we didn’t have enough to make it through the week so we called the hospital again and they were still out of stock and suggested we just try phoning around and maybe someone had some old stock.  Fortunately the third pharmacy we called had some stock and we had the prescription transferred down there and managed to get her some antibiotics for this week and the next couple of months.

The kids are getting excited about soccer season.  Karlee was supposed to start tomorrow, but with the snow Thursday and Friday they have closed the fields and are postponing the season for another week.  Ryley is still hopefully going to start on Tuesday assuming they reopen the fields.  Ryley has several players from his team last year on his team again so we should have another great year.  We had the kids put on their cleats and shin pads and went out last weekend to give them a little practice.  They both had a great time which will hopefully translate into a good season.

Karlee has been enjoying preschool again now that she is healthy.  Her teacher is retiring this year after 20 years of running Jamie’s Preschool.  It will be interesting to see how they replace Mrs. Mackie since she is great with both the kids and the parents and has been such and integral part of the school for so long.  Thursday’s seem to be Karlee’s favourite day since she gets to go to Gymnastics first and then goes to school.  The people at Star’s Gymnastics do a great job with the kids.  Having such a small group and one of the students having an aide means that the kids get almost one-on-one attention.  Dad got to take her one week and it was fun to watch her enthusiastically attack each element.

We have started going for nightly walks again now that the weather is a little better.  Karlee loves the wetlands just at the end of our street.  The geese have started to nest so we will have little goslings very soon.  We also saw 3 muskrats swimming around the other night.  We have looked for years and have only ever seen one at a time.  It looks like she had a couple of little muskrats.  Now we take the camera when we go for walks and try and get a picture of the young ones. 
We have a pretty full and fun weekend planned with dinner out tomorrow night and then a friend’s band is playing at a pub on Sunday night.  Grandma is going to have a busy weekend with a couple of kids.