Chemo! Dun, dun, dun!

This is a picture of how the nurses dress just to put the chemo on the IV pump! Its such nasty medicine everyone takes tons of precautions to protect themselves. So sorry if I bore you but I want to document his drugs just for a diary. The first day of chemo is called Day 1. We started last night at about 11:30 so last night is Day 1.
The first drug is called Ara-C this is an IV push every 12 hours X10 days. This drug is the backbone of the chemo. Kids with ALL will only get a few doses of this or none at all. With AML its the main drug. It has really good penetration into the spinal fluid, which we know from his last LP (lumbar puncture or spinal tap) that he already has leukemia cells in his spinal fluid (not a good sign but its one we can fix). He will be getting LPs done twice a week with Ara-C pushed directly into the spinal column on top of the scheduled q12hrs X10 days. So lots of this drug.This drug can really irritate the eyes and cause infection. So we are getting eye drops every four hours to prevent this. Critter hates this the most.

The next drug is called Daunorubicin. This will be an IV drip given over 6 hours. This will be given on days 1, 3 and 5. This drug is one of them that is responsible for hair loss. They say in about 2 weeks he will start losing his hair. Oh well bald boys are cute! We plan on shaving it when it starts to fall out.

The next drug is called Etoposide. This is IV drip over 4 hours. He gets this days 1 through 5. This drug (as well as all the others) will cause nausea and vomiting, sores in his mouth and a drop in blood pressure. So they check blood pressure at least every hour, most of the time more than that, when this drug is going in. We are waiting for mouth sores they say it might be a few weeks or not until he has has a few rounds of chemo before they will appear. He might not want to eat so if that happens they will start feeding tubes, but we will cross that bridge when we get there. For nausea he is on Zofran(my favorite drug) every 8 hours and Benadryl (I guess this works great as anti-nausea drug for kids) every 4 hours. There is a long list of stuff they can give him for nausea but these two seem to be doing the trick for now.

The last drug is called Gemtuzamab and this is only on day 6 and has all of the same side effects as the other drugs. So there is our long list of mean meds that are going to kill the cancer! Wahoo for modern medicine!