Riding for Roses

It’s birthday week at our house. Jacob’s birthday was Friday and Spencer’s is today. We had a party for Spencer at Capital Gymnastics on Saturday and had about 20 kids. They have two huge gyms and they have the kids do one session in each room with a water break between. They have trampolines, balance beams, mats, ropes to climb, a bouncy castle, and what one friend calls a “kid habitrail” – tubes, tunnels, nets, a room full of plastic balls. Spencer chose a SpongeBob theme, copying from Mohan, one of his friends. We had Russell’s Bakery do the cake from a sketch one of their counter people did, and it was beautiful and delicious. It was heartening to see Spencer and his friends playing. It was also a little heartbreaking, seeing how, even in this maintenance phase, Spencer’s energy is not even close to what it was before October.

Today, Rachel, her Dad, and I went to Spencer’s school for his birthday celebration. We whipped together a couple of posters full of pictures. For the celebration Spencer walked a around a circle labeled with the months of the year, starting on February. Each time he completed one circuit, we showed a couple of pictures from when he was that old. It was fun. It also reminds me I need to go through all of those pictures, load them on my new computer, load some on the ReplayTV, and print some for a real album.

It’s also sort of a celebration of Spencer’s last week before starting delayed intensification and with that comes a little fear. Pediatric oncologists have an awesome communication tool they call a “road map” which is a day by day listing of procedures, chemotherapy, and other medications for the entire cycle of chemotherapy. We have the roadmaps for the entire standard protocol and Spencer’s branch of CCG-1991. I looked through the road map for the next 8 (or more, part of it requires waiting for blood counts to come back a bit and could go longer) weeks and it looks tough. He starts with Vincristine, a lumbar puncture and a doxorubicin infusion on Valentine’s day – be still my heart. The doxorubicin is new and the infusion means an extra 30 minutes to 2 hours in the oncologists office after the procedure. Monday is going to be a long day. We have grandpa here still in case the day goes long enough that we need fill-in care for Jacob after day care closes. In addition to that and higher doses of some of what he’s been taking, he has another pegasparinase shot on day 3 (February 17). That’s going to suck for Spencer because it is an intramuscular shot in his leg(s? last time it was one shot in each thigh) and last time he got one one of the nurses missed the spot where the numbing cream had been applied, so his anxiety will be higher.

So that’s the future. Tonight, however, we have more birthday presents from family, plus he’s still not done opening presents from his party on Saturday. We also get to finish the cake from Saturday. Yum.

For now, I am off to the Lance Armstrong Foundation offices for a volunteer reception. If all goes well, I’ll get into the volunteer pipeline there and start doing something useful for other cancer survivors.