July 25th, 2005
Chemotherapy Shutdown Begins
As expected, Spencer needed red cells today. We go back to the oncologist on Wednesday for Neulasta and probably a unit of platelets. He made it through the busy Tour de France viewing event and fundraising apparently without infection or virus. The frequent handwashing and cleaning with Purell possibly helped.
Over the weekend, Spencer was pretty tired at the Tour de France viewing event, but still worked the crowd in his special way. It was media madness at the event, with all the local TV stations there at some point, a couple of them with in-depth interviews. The Austin American-Statesmen included Spencer in their stories over the weekend. There we even a handful of visitors to this blog as a result of broadcasts. It looks like we got over $1500 in donations to support cancer survivors on Sunday. I won’t have the final tally until tomorrow and even that will not include donations mailed using the forms we were handing out. Online donations have been a little slow. Likely, I need better links at the top of the blog page.
Spencer went in on Friday, had an exam and the first of four daily doses of cytarabine. Over the weekend, we went to the Tour Watch in the morning, and came home to do cytarabine IV in the afternoon. Today was the last day of cytarabine. Ever—if Specner continues to do well, this is the end of cytarabine for the normal 3 years and 2 months of treatment. Last week, I got to de-access his port-a-cath (remove the needle from his chest). This week, we anticipated low counts, so we went to the oncologist to get a CBC. Sure enough, white blood count was a staggeringly low 400. ANC was something less than 200—I only have the machine count, so I’m not sure. Hemoglobin on the machine was 6.9. The machine usually reads a little low, so it was probably 7.2-7.4. Platelets were 59,000. We’ll get the real numbers on Wednesday when we return. All of those numbers are very low, some lower than his counts at diagnosis. This time around they are not the result of cancer cells, they are the result of his bone marrow being shut down by chemotherapy to make sure the cancer cells die.
After a 2 hour wait for the blood bank to process things and 2 more hours for the transfusion, we ran down to the Texas State Capitol for a visit with, and personal Capitol tour from, our State Representative from District 50, Mark Strama who stopped by the Tour Watch at Central Market on Wednesday to see Spencer and play Ben’s Game with him on the computers at the Austin Podcasting Network. The tour was a lot of fun. He covered his favorite parts of the capitol and let Spencer sit at his desk in the chambers and learn how to use the voting (and other) buttons that are part of the desk. We met several other representatives and had a great time talking about leukemia, politics, fundraising efforts, and potato chips available in the capitol cafeteria. Representative Strama was very generous with his time, both on Wednesday (stopping for over half an hour just to talk and play games with Spencer) and today (taking an hour and a half out of an admittedly slow day to give a special tour to a five year old). Representative Strama invited us to join him at the Light the Night walk on November 5. We’ll be there.
The biggest positive I get out being Spencer’s caregiver is the repeated opportunity to connect with people and talk about cancer. I’ll try to write more on this tomorrow. I especially want to capture some bits from the Tour Watch before they fade from memory.
The rest of the day was our usual mad rush to pick up Rachel and Jacob, get us all fed, bathe the boys, and get everyone to sleep—speaking of which, it is now my turn. Good night, all.
