2005 Journal Entries

Archie is doing really well. He just started his fourth day of chemotherapy, which will be his last day this round per his prescribed protocol. He made it through the first two days without incident (that's when they worry about kidney failure, etc.) and his blood counts are decreasing/increasing as expected. His platelets are very high, but the doctors said that's fine and gave him a half a baby asprin to counteract any possible negative side affects from the high number. Archie received a transfusion of red blood cells yesterday because his hemoglobin was low, but his count has held steady ever since.

Today is the first day Archie is really looking and acting like himself. He isn't puffy from all the excess fluids anymore, and his stomach is a normal size again (one of the reasons we brought him in Monday night was because his tummy was so incredibly distended and actually bruised toward the bottom from the expansion of his liver and spleen). He's happy today and smiling, and interacting with us all. We played the "Signing Time" videos for him yesterday and he actually learned some new signs.

The doctors are really pleased with Archie's progress and response to the chemotherapy. They expected his white blood cell count to be around 20,000 about half-way through this first round, but his count had already hit 7,000 (down from the mid 100,000). His blasts are way down, too, around 14 - 16 percent. When we brought him in on Monday night his blasts were at 87 percent.

Archie's protocol maintains we have at least/at most three more rounds of chemotherapy to go. Two of those rounds will be identical to the four-day treatment Archie just endured, and the last round will be longer (like maybe nine days?) with one less drug (I think, I don't have the documentation in front of me right now). Of course all of that may change if Archie does really well with treatment, or if his blood work indicates he needs more help than currently prescribed. We will probably get to take Archie home Tuesday or Wednesday of this week if he's able to maintain his counts and electrolytes after the current round of treatment has concluded. We will of course have lots of doctor's appointments to keep, though.

We've been told several times that Archie is very, very fortunate to have developed leukemia before turning two years old. Dr. Hayes says that there's something magical about age two that the medical community can't explain that changes the body from baby to child and makes a person less responsive to cancer treatment in the case of AML-M7. He said that he hates Archie has to be going through this now, but he's "glad" it happened when it did and not later because he felt we've been headed in this direction for some time now (so did I ... call it mother's intuition).

Of course I'm pretty pissed off that Archie has to endure this now. Why is it always my child and hasn't he been through enough already? But I feel relieved, too, in a way. This leukemia stuff has been a monkey on back since Archie was about three hours old and we got the results of his first CBC. Let's just let Archie kick cancer's ass now when he's really too young to remember the fight so that we can get on with life. He's never gonna believe us when he's older and we tell him all that's been through, and what a survivor he is.