He did have some wonderful moments during his brief times in the park. His favorite rides are Star Tours and Soaring Over California, which we frequented and used the “Max Pass” - a pass similar to a fast-pass but you can use it on any ride at anytime. He also enjoyed a few rides early one morning in Fantasyland and of course the Autopia.
Max mostly wanted to sleep.
He was happy to be home Friday afternoon and couldn’t wait to see Naboo, whom he thought must have missed us terribly. The cat was indeed very happy to see the kids.
Saturday morning he had an apopintment to go the oncology ward for platelets: he was critically low: 4 — ouch. Monday found him in clinic to start a new chemo cycle. The same that Andy mentioned in the last post: temador and irinotecan. He also needed another platelet transfusion as he was at 3! (Just two days after getting platelets. sigh…) So Monday started a new treatment cycle that will find Max in the clinic every weekday for two weeks getting IV chemo in addition to the platelets and red blood he’s going to need even more now that we’ve had to start him on some kind of toxic treatment.
We also took an xray of his lungs and left knee. He’s been coughing and complaining constantly about the knee. The xray results had him in for an immediate CTscan: His lungs appeared to have extensive disease throughout. However, they couldn’t rule out an infection, pneumonia, or bleeding and so a bronchoscopy was scheduled for Wednesday morning. A bronchoscopy is a simple outpatient procedure where the doc runs a camera down Max’s windpipe to the lungs, looks around, squirts a little saline in there and sucks it back out to grow cultures. Because Max’s platelets are questionable he had to spend the night Tuesday to get a fresh load of platelets prior to the morning procedure - just in case.
Andy brought Hannah & Nicky down in the morning before Max went in for the bronchoscopy. He was so happy to see them, he smiled and chatted. It was a nice scene. The bronchoscopy took all of 10 mintues and the doc reported back that she saw no evidence of disease inside. His upper right lung appeared to be squished by something on the outside - probably the nodules that have grown - and she said this could cause him to cough because he’d be unable to clear that part of his lung of gunk when he needed to. It looked irritated and bled a little when she flushed it. (We’ll have an official report soon and will post any other findings as they become available.)
So not as scary as we had originally thought; but obviously far from being out of the woods.
