Thursday Clinic Visit - Maintenance Round 10

Today's clinic visit was pretty routine...Check in, weight & height, port access, blood draw...
wait...do an art project with "fun" Chris...
wait...talk to nurses...
wait...talk to Dr. Keuker....
wait...talk to Jen Spencer, Katie's nurse practitioner...
CBC results, administer Vincristine (chemo), de-access port, go home, Katie takes a nap.

Today, Kaitlyn was very adamant that she did not want her port accessed. She put up a pretty good fight...holding on to her shirt with all her might, pulling her arms away from us, kicking and screaming...VERY LOUDLY. As hard as it is to watch her go through this at every visit, today, I couldn't help but think, "YOU GO GIRL!". Here she is, basically being restrained, having something done to her that causes her pain. As badly as I wanted her to stay still so that her nurse could get the needle in the right spot and not have to re-do the whole thing, a part of me was happy that she had that much strength to fight us off :-)

Her white blood count was high again, so I raised the question about the possibility of having to increase her dose of the Methotrexate in order to bring her counts down a bit lower. But, Jen noted that her counts would have to be high for 3 consecutive rounds in order to increase any of the doses. So, we will have to wait and see what her counts look like over the next few rounds.

I also informed them of the vomiting episode that Katie experienced after her last clinic visit, which included a lumbar puncture. Jen looked back at the chart and found that the dose of Zofran (anti-nausea medicine that they administer before the LP) was 1/2 the dose that she usually gets. She couldn't tell us why the dose was changed, but it was. So, next time she has a lumbar puncture, I will have to double check that she is getting the correct dose of Zofran.

Today's clinic visit consisted of the following:
1) Port access
2) a blood draw
3) Vincristine (Chemo)

This cycle will consist of the following:
Vincristine - Day 1 (same dose as previous cycles)
Methotrexate (oral at home chemo) - Days 1, 8 & 15 (same dose as the last cycle)
6-mercapturine (oral at home chemo) - Days 1-14 (same dose as the last cycle)
Dexamethasone (oral at home steroid)- Days 1-5 (same dose as the last cycle)

Next planned clinic visit will be in three weeks, October 29th.