Day 29

There was this movie I rented to watch at home one night back in the mid 1980's.  Not sure why I remember this better than other long forgotten moments from over 20 years ago but it was definately very soon after my father had just acquired our first ever family VCR.  To be sure, it was definately a solid 7-8 years B.R.  (Before Rudy).  The movie was Disney's "Tiger Town" starring Roy Scheider.  Never saw it in the theatres, in fact never knew it existed in the theatres, but you knew when a movie had hit the big time in its theatre after-life because it was also available in Beta.  As the story goes, a boy named Alex follows his favorite baseball team (Detroit Tigers) religiously and is particularly attached to its star slugger played by Scheider.  The boy overcomes alot of adversity in his home life to maintain his attachment to Scheider's character. When Alex is at the game and Scheider is up to bat, he passionately clasps his hands together in his lap, closes his eyes tight, and "wills" Scheider to hit a home run.  In true Disney fashion, he hits a home run everytime.  The key was Alex had to be at the game.  The final game of the season is played and Alex has a ticket but is detained by several factors (bullies being one of them).  He finally arrives in the ninth running towards the front of the grandstands to see Scheider, who has struck out the whole game, hit the game winner.  Gotta love Disney films sometimes.  Faith through Baseball.

A person is diagnosed with a serious blood disease every four minutes in this country.  In 2010 alone, approximately 43,000 people were diagnosed with Leukemia and about 260,000 currently living with it or in remission.  Startling, really.  Why did I never pay much attention to things like this?  They have my full attention now.  In 1963, a child younger than 15 years old had a 3% chance of survival.  In 2011, that number is between 85-90%.  The first major marker of progress is the end of Induction (first month of treatment) which is "Day 29".  On that day, the expectation is the blood is free of BLASTS (leukemic cells) and the bone marrow contains below 0.01% cancer cells.  If this occurs, the child is considered in Remission and the protocol for treatment, which is really just getting started, moves into the Consolidation Phase to keep the cancer from coming back.  Ellie was put into the high responder category at the progress report marker of Day 8 because she had gone from 93% cancer in her marrow down to 1%.  Her blood was clear of leukemia on Day 8, so our big concern is the residual count of leukemia cells in her marrow.  95% of leukemia patients achieve remission by day 29 and thus qualify for those very favorable published survival stats.

Yesterday she underwent a bone marrow aspiration to get a sample for testing as she has done twice before and get an intrathecal spinal injection of Methotrexate (chemo drug) to keep her spine the way it currently is - free of cancer cells.  They call that a Lumbar Puncture (LP).  It was much easier this time around for all of us.  Perhaps the hardest part is that it is a very early day since we have to be over at LPCH by 7am but Ellie handled everything yesterday without as much as a single tear.  It is good timing for her finding a comfort zone too because she'll be having an LP done each of the next four weeks in the next phase of treatment.  We're starting to get to know all of the regular staff members in the clinic too (who now recognize Ellie) and that helps as much as anything from Polly and I's perspective.  The residual test on her marrow takes about 48 hours (sent to a lab in Seattle) so we have a meeting this Thursday afternoon with our doctor to go over the results.  I'll post the results here when we know them.

Today has been awesome.  Nice 80° day here in the Bay.  Polly and I are home with the kids and able to do most things normally.  You know when Ellie is feeling good because she carefully answers questions by preficing them with "Umm-Min-Nah".  So, in responding to what color something is, she jubilantly exclaims "Umm-Min-Nah-YELLOW!"  She is happier now than even the entire month of June, I think.  Polly has become very good at giving Ellie her last few days of hour long IV pushes of antibitoics through her PICC line which are given every 6 hours (inlcuding throughout the night).  We'll be done with those this afternoon thankfully.  Her platelet count is now back to normal which puts some worry to bed of her falling down and cutting herself (platelets are what make your blood clot).

We'll deal with the results tomorrow the best way we can in any regard.  We're not shy on strength right now after the week we've had, but we are still humbled by the fact that we don't have the ultimate control here.  For now though, Hope is in charge, on our side, and in full swing.  From my vantage point at home, I am sitting inches from the sideline with my hands clasped tightly in my lap and my eyes are closed.  I believe in my Daughter - let's do this.