Interim Maintenance 2: Treatment 2

Cooper's current schedule has him at Hopkins every 11 days for 2-3 rounds of chemo depending on the treatment day. Being home for 10 days without a hospital visit or chemo felt like an eternity compared to what we were doing in intensification. We all really enjoyed seeing Cooper feel good and not running the roads to Hopkins.

On Friday we went in for treatment 2 which was 2 doses of chemo that Cooper tolerates really well. They wanted to see how he tolerates the second and third doses since it is an escalating dose and also since he was starting this phase much lower and more suppressed before they determine a specific start date for school. They are also watching flu and sick trending closely before sending him back. 

Since Coop was starting behind the 8 ball with a lower hemoglobin, he actually ended up needing blood again on Friday. Basically, when they gave him chemo on day 1 he didn't really have to fall far at all in order to get below the threshold for needing products and the chemo they gave him bumped him down just enough to need it. So unfortunately, what we thought would be a relatively short day at clinic turned into an all day event. 
 Waiting for blood in the infusion center
Playing some card games with grandad. Coop kept telling the nurses to keep and eye on him because he might cheat when you're not looking! ha ha!

I also have to say that Friday was one of the saddest and most alarming days I have every witnessed at clinic. It was packed and beyond insane there. The waiting room, infusion center, infusion rooms, regular patient rooms were all full and it was basically standing room only. They were getting nursing help from other departments. They ran out of IV poles and pumps and were pulling them from other floors. They were using the conference rooms in both the clinic and inpatient as treatment rooms. They had nowhere to put anyone. It was devastating to see how many people have to go through this. It makes you wonder really how rare this actually is, if one of the biggest and best hospitals can't find a place for people on a peds onc unit. Just plain surreal and stressful and sad to know that this was just "Friday".

All in all, I guess you just never think that a blood transfusion is the "easy problem" of the day to have. We felt thankful that we know that a low hemoglobin is a pretty easy fix and other than that, Cooper's counts look great and we will be back in 11 more days.

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