Round 3

 Thursday Carter started his 3rd round of Chemo:  "Interim Maintenance".  This is exciting for a couple reasons.  First of all, our 3-year timer begins now.  So mark you calendars, folks!  April 14, 2014 Carter will be DONE!!!  Secondly, he only has one more round after this (which will be pretty intense, but we won't think about that yet) before we get to "Maintenance"  which lasts for what remains of the 3 years.  At that point, the chemo isn't too crazy so he'll feel good., his hair will grow back and he'll start school and everything.  He's doing it!  We're getting closer to Maintenance!!  So, back to this round.  So far, it's going really well.  It's not as scary as I thought it would be.  It's a bummer that he has to be in the hospital every two weeks but it's not too bad.  It started Thursday morning with a sedation and lumbar puncture with Intrathecal Methotrexate injected into his spinal fluid.  6 hours after that, the High Dose Methotrexate begins and is infused over a 24 hour period.  That first night he wasn't feeling great but still not too bad.  Check out that gigantic bag of poison, I mean chemo hanging from his IV pole.  Usually his bags of chemo are really small and even that seems like a lot to me.  This is just ridiculous.  I can't believe that whole bag just went into my son's veins.

 Since he's not sick like last week, he's not in isolation.  He can leave his room whenever he wants and now that the chemo is done he can even leave the unit so he can see his brother!  They were both very excited to see each other out in the hall yesterday.

And he got to go to the play room and do arts and crafts.  One of the volunteers there made him this dinosaur out of clay.  He loved it and started to "cook" food for him and then feed it to him with a fork :)

 

 His chemo pal came to play with him yesterday afternoon.  And Grandma also came to be with him and even spent the night in the hospital with him.  I think he had a pretty good day yesterday.  The nurse is guessing that we'll get to leave Monday morning.

 Along with the  Methotrexate, he's also getting two other drugs, both of which he's had before.  Vincristine and Mercaptopurine.  The "rescue medicine" should start sometime today.  So far so good :)