Rosie has finished 3 of her 6 Chemo Cycles. She had a few visits to emerg. the last 2 months with nose bleeding, fever, and anemia which usually is due to low platelets, low white or red blood cells which required transfusions. (All due to chemo). The doctor also had to stop one of her Chemo drugs because she was starting to have some poor walking gait and choking issues. Thank goodness these were mild side effects and both reversible. Otherwise, Rosie is still her happy self and enjoys every opportunity we are home with family and also at the playroom in the hospital. Starting next week, Rosie will start her Intensive Consolidation Chemotherapy. This involves strong Chemo medications to replace Radiotherapy. She will have 3 cycles of the intensive consolidated chemo for the next 3 months.
After she receives each of the intensive chemo treatment, she will be given Autologous Stem Cell Transplant. The Stem Cell she will be receiving are her own that was harvested last month. The harvest process done was similar to dialysis: they took some blood out of her system and run it into a machine and filtered out her Stem Cells (which included WBC) and returned her blood back to her body. She had a Femoral Central Line inserted and the procedure was done the following day. She had to stay flat in bed during this period. We were lucky they were able to collect enough Stem Cells in one day (6 hours of collection). She endured it and was very cooperative.
