Long Day at The Spa
Published on 5 Feb 2007 at 4:00 pm.
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Today’s chemo went fine, as expected, although due to drug interactions and other complicated “medical stuff” spent nearly 8 hours at The Spa. We arrived at roughly 8AM and left pretty close to 5PM. She received both CPT-11 (with a number of support drugs) and a new drug called Avastin. For this dose of chemo Dr. Loukas turned up the strength. He expects that Friday will be a tough day for her physically due to the effects of the treatment.
Chemo, by the nature of its effectiveness, kills off the red and white blood cells in the body leaving it extremely susceptible to infection, not unlike an AIDS patient. Because of the strength of this round of Maggie’s chemo this is of particular concern (this immuno-deficient condition is known as neutropenia and can last for up to 12 days.) Dr. Loukas has prescribed an injection called Neulasta. The fun part is that it can’t be taken until 24 hours after chemo so that means that we will be in Waco (and not in Austin where the nurses are) when the injection is due. So… Chris will be giving her the injection on Tuesday evening. Oh, and this 6 milligram injection costs $7,000. For those of you who just fogged up your glasses, that’s seven thousand dollars for this one single injection. And since this injection kick-starts her recently poisoned immune system it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that Maggie’s life really depends on this being done right. But no pressure. Really.
Dr. Loukas showed us how Maggie’s liver has expanded to just above her belly button whereas it should end very close to her rib cage. That was… uhm… interesting. The good news is that her liver appears to be still functioning within normal parameters.
Next Steps For Maggie
The next spa visit is on Monday, February 19th for her next infusion of Avastin (on a two-week schedule in contrast to a three-week schedule for CPT-11).
Tomorrow, Maggie has to take a final from last quarter, attend class at 10:30 and hopefully, talk to whoever can assist with helping her arrange her schedule such that Mondays are free for her to continue her treatments. Hopefully we can figure out some solution to the newly created class schedule issue that will satisfy Baylor and allow Maggie to continue to receive treatment. It’s so extremely frustrating to have this issue pop up at the last minute. After three long years of hard work Maggie lacks merely 9 hours to complete her course work for her law degree at Baylor.
