Chemo and Christmas Activities

Karlee’s new dose of chemo is already starting to have some side effects.  They increased her dose because her counts have been higher than they like to see over the last 3 months.  This means the chemo isn’t beating her down (and killing cells) as hard as it should be.  Chemo doesn’t just target the bad cells, but it kills all the cells which is supposed to ensure the cancer doesn’t come back.  She has a rash on her feet that she has had for a while, but it has gotten worse and now it is very itchy.  There have been a couple of nights where she has not been able to get to sleep because her feet have been bothering her.  She is also more run down and tired than she has been.  We keep expecting her to spike a fever due to the way she is acting, but her temperature keeps coming back normal.  This week is a double whammy because in addition to the new chemo dose she is on steroids so she is eating like a horse.

Over Christmas we managed to do a number of fun things with the kids.  For Christmas Grandma got us passes to the new Telus Science Centre so we headed there between Christmas and New Year’s.  They have a nice new building and the exhibits aren’t falling apart anymore.  The kids enjoyed the kid’s gallery and liked playing with all the hands on exhibits.  Ryley’s favourite part was taking pictures of objects and turning them into a video and then adding sound to his movie.  He was supposed to be able to see it at home, but they are still working on that part of their website.  We went to one of their shows and everyone was excited about the liquid nitrogen and the isopropyl alcohol rocket.  I’m sure we will get good use out of the passes this year.

On January 3rd we went rollerskating with the Scouts.  This is the second year we have done this activity and everyone enjoys it.  Karlee did a great job skating this year without any help.  Last year she was too sick to go to the rollerskating event so this was only her second time trying it.  She loved getting out there and going for it.  Ryley had a great time too as he always does.  It is nice to see that Lloyds hasn’t changed in 30 years.

This last weekend was a lot of hockey.  We started out with a practice in High River on Friday night.  Jennifer and Karlee went swimming down there while we were on the ice.  Ryley was goalie and worked up a good sweat.  Saturday we had a league game at 9am and then we headed to Strathmore for a tournament game at noon.  Sunday we had another pair of games in Strathmore.  We were definitely in the wrong division for this tournament as we lost all 3 games and 2 of them were ugly.  This was a Tier 5 tournament that is supposed to be division 7/8 and we are division 6.  We have another tournament coming up that is Tier 4… we need to get out of that one or it will be a massacre.  Sunday afternoon we joined Chris, Tanya and McKenzie at the Trico Centre for an afternoon of swimming.  Monday morning the kids were back at school.  Both of them were excited to go back and we are all looking forward to getting back to a routine.

One of the other Mom’s in the clinic the day that Karlee coded wrote a blog entry about it.  It is interesting to get another point of view on what happened and how it affects everyone.  You can find her blog here: http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/TySparks/journal.  I can not link to the exact entry, but it was published on Friday January 6th.