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Fri. 1/2/04 - New Year

Friday, 1/2/04
Happy New Year! Les and I spent New Year’s Eve and part of New Year’s Day in the hospital. I found out that the cafeteria doesn’t serve much for breakfast on a holiday. Other than that, the stay was fairly uneventful with no surprises.

Let me catch you up on all that happened last month since my last update. Les had two more transfusions, one for hemoglobin and one for platelets. They went smoothly. His energy level was fairly low for the majority of the month, but he did perk up a bit more around Christmas. Praise God, Christmas came during a “rest-week” when he didn’t receive any chemo. His counts were high enough for me to not be too worried about infections and our schedule was slow enough that I think we all rather enjoyed the opportunity to kick back and relax.

Christmas was wonderful. With extended family and travel plans for others, we stretched our “Christmas” from the weekend prior to, well now – we’re still waiting to deliver and receive at least one more gift. I like to stretch it out this way. It helps to extend the season a bit more. Les received enough to make us need to rearrange the furniture in our front room to make room for the new toys. He really liked Christmas.

Today a home care nurse is coming by to deliver and administer Les’ G-CSF shot. G-CSF is a hormone that helps the bone marrow recover more quickly after chemo. That way, when his counts drop (especially white cells, the infection fighting ones) the duration of time that they are low will be decreased and then they come back up. We are trying something new this round. Instead of me giving Les one shot a day for 10 days in a row, the nurse is going to give him just one shot. This new shot is a formulation that is originally intended for adults, but they are reducing the dose by 1/3 and we hope that it is effective for Les. If his counts don’t recover as anticipated this round, we may need to go back to the other 10-shot regimen for the remaining rounds. Please pray that this “one-shot” will be effective.

That pretty much summarizes it in a nutshell. We’ve been told that the further along you go in the chemo process the longer it takes for the body to recover after each round, so our prayer request would be that Les would be able to recover enough for the treatment rounds to not be delayed. We are still looking at a completion of all the treatment this summer.