Fuck Cancer

I'm sorry to anyone who is offended by my use of that certain four letter word, but my Mommy taught me long ago that sometimes there is just no better word. I love my Mom. Today is just one of those days that deserves a great big old FUCK CANCER!

For the first time in this process, my baby boy is in some real pain and I can't stand it. I just want to jump in that bed and switch places with him. The sores in his mouth and down his esophagus have gotten bad and super painful. He hasn't eaten in days even though he says he's hungry and keeps asking for food. Yesterday, he would continually try eating something, then scream out in pain when it went down his throat and decide that eating was a bad idea. Finally, I got the doctors to give him some pain medication, which seemed to help a bit but it would wear off eventually. He got to the point where he was just letting the spit drip out of his mouth rather than swallow it, because it was too painful to swallow anything. Then, the spit would eventually build up in his throat and he would gag on it and "throw up" a bunch of bloody spit...and cry and cry from the pain of it. Are you with me now that FUCK might just be an appropriate word right about now?

I worked and worried all day today while Nate was well taken care of by Papa, Grandma, Lou Lou and Linde. The doctors worked on a plan to make Nate more comfortable and support him until his immune system comes back to heal these awful sores. Here are all the things my sweet, little 35 pound boy is currently having pumped in to his body. Fluids, TPN (IV nutrition), Cefoxime and gentamicin (2 different antibiotics they use "just in case" because he came in with a fever), metronidazole (another antibiotic because a bacteria showed up in his stool), fluconazole (an antifungal he gets daily that is supposed to help prevent mouth sores...ha!), Protonix (decreases stomach acid to help his esophageal sores heal), Neupogen (injection he gets daily to help boost his white cell count), and now they have him on a continuous morphine drip with a button we can push to give him a morphine boost if he's in pain. He's also had 2 platelet and one blood transfusion in the last 3 days which he gets Tylenol and benadryl prior to getting, to prevent a reaction. They were also giving him zofran to prevent nausea but we have determined that any throwing up he was doing was not from nausea but from an accumulation of spit. So, I'm not sure if he's still getting the zofran.

He had stayed fever free for over 24 hours which is awesome and is also a condition of his release, but then spiked another fever this evening. They tried to give him Tylenol by mouth 2 times but he gagged it up both times. There is no such thing as IV Tylenol and the only other form it comes in is a suppository and kids on chemo can not have suppositories of any kind because the "mouth sores" extend all the way down their GI tract and to their rectum. So, they can't have anything placed in their rectum at all. With oral Tylenol being his only option to bring down his fever and him gagging it up, my aunt was put to the task of cooling him down with cool, wet rags, which eventually worked. The fever is a major bummer because it could mean that there is another infection at work, but I'm praying that it was just due to him receiving platelets because it is pretty common to spike a fever after receiving platelets. We will find out what the culture shows up with tomorrow. If it grows something, they will switch his antibiotics and he will certainly be here much, much longer.

So, are you with me now? All together now...let's hear a great big, loud "FUCK CANCER".

Wanna hear some good news? Lou Lou keeps reminding me that as far as the cancer goes, Nate is beating it. After hearing the worst news of all, "Your son has high risk Neuroblastoma", all other news about his "fucking cancer" has been good news. "We are staying ahead of it", as Lou Lou likes to say. We just have to get through the awful, awful side effects of these treatments. For every one of the side effects my sweet boy is having to endure, there better be at least 100 billion cancer cells killed! You hear that cancer! We're killing you dead forever!