I'm slowly learning the rhythm of chemotherapy rounds. Of course, as soon as I learned the rhythm of Thomas's shorter chemo (3 partial days), he switched to longer chemo (5 full days). Now that I'm learning how to manage longer chemo, we will soon be in November with Thomas facing surgery instead. Anyway, Week 3 of the cycle means no more isolation: Thomas has better lab numbers so we intend to squeeze in some fun outings!
1. Weekend
"Look, Mama, two new kids are arriving in a box!"
 |
| Cute Thomas in the back yard |
 |
| Thomas's drawing inspired by watching Muppet's Treasure Island |
2. Monday
Thomas received the most delightful dinosaur card from a grown-up friend!
3. Tuesday
Thomas wanted to dress as a doctor in scrubs when going to Clinic. The staff all loved it and one nurse in particular fawned all over him, saying they needed new, young doctors there because all they had were old doctors. Then she added, "I'm going to go get my coffee, but when I come back, I'll have you come help me do some doctor work."
After she left, Thomas leaned into me in all sincerity and whispered, "Mama, I'm not a doctor. I'm just a little boy!" Tears sprung to my eyes at his innocence.
 |
| Don't be fooled: he's just a little boy! |
We passed the time waiting for lab results by playing many rounds of Dino Dig, a matching card game.
His ANC and white blood cells are good-for-cancer, so we got the thumbs up for various fun activities upcoming. His red blood cells are good (so he's not tired), but his platelets (for clotting) are down: They are not so far down as to merit a transfusion but they are too low to allow him to receive chemotherapy. Due to these low platelets, he is covered in small bruises, some more than a week old, about 15 of them at last count. Please pray that his platelets rise to 75 before Monday so that chemo, scans, and surgery are not all delayed a week.
The rest of the day was one of regular homeschool and in-home music lessons.
4. Wednesday
Homeschool . . . construction paper pumpkin crafts with the little ones . . . music practice . . . orthodontist visit . . . early voting! Chris and I realized that November 3 will be during the week Thomas is statistically likely to land in the hospital with an infection, so we decided to go for early, in-person voting. It went swimmingly well!
I still remember my intake interview with the oncology social worker during which she asked about Thomas's education and had me brace myself, "You know, he will probably have to delay Kindergarten a year." Not that I thought he would have a typical Kindergarten year, but I thought to myself, "Just watch us!"
Being my fifth child, I had not been doing any academic work with him prior to this fall, so he only learned to recognize his letters and count to ten the summer being four years old. Yet here we are, eight weeks into our unconventional school year, full of chemo weeks and vomiting, and blending has really 'clicked' for Thomas. He is reading words! I filmed some video probably only a parent could love. Later that night at Mass, Thomas kept stage whispering to me as he read words in the missal or on the walls or as he spelled words he was sounding out in his head. Never has teaching a child of mine to read felt so sweet.
Recently the children have found a tree cracked and bent over from the tornado and big storms. They have been having the best time traversing it fifteen feet in the air, but Dad and I took a tour of all the ways someone could fall off it and land in the hospital from being skewered on big limbs on the ground, so we took this photo of the last time they were allowed to climb it. Any future climbing is verboten!
I told Thomas that in the evening, we would be able to take him to Mass for the first time in three weeks and that he would be able to receive Holy Communion. He burst into a grin: "I love my holy communions!"
Then I even got to stay with Mary to attend Fidelis, which was a lovely bonding time for us girls but not at all appreciated by Thomas, from whom I have rarely been apart for six months. I had buckled the boys in the van, but when Thomas saw Dad get behind the driver's seat and me step back, he shouted, unbuckled, leapt out of the vehicle, ran and leapt into my arms, where he clung, crying. I just hope he did not see me crying as I encouraged him to sleep in our bed right on my pillow so that he would know as soon as I got home because I would climb in bed and scooch him over . . . which is exactly how it worked out.
5. Thursday
Regular homeschool day . . . haircuts for boys . . . and watching the Presidential debate with the top three kids! The more stately behavior by both candidates made it a very enjoyable watching experience, the way debates should be.
 |
| Artwork by Margaret (9) |
 |
| 'Man Reading Beneath a Tree' by Thomas (5) |
 |
| 'Four Astronauts in Outer Space' by Thomas (5) |
6. Friday
On Friday, we enjoyed a fantastic tour of Tatanka Bison Ranch: click here to read all about it!
 |
And we have even more fun things planned for Saturday and Sunday before another 40 hours of chemo!
7. Bonus Reading
Nationwide, children are being essentially denied their right to an education, being given substandard education via Zoom, while those who are monied are simply enrolling their children in private school which is full-time and in-person. We are two months in to this bizarre school year and the first large study that I know of is revealed: Of 200,000 full-time, in-person students across 47 states studied, 0.13% have caught Coronavirus (not the number who were hospitalized or died, which well may well have been statistical zero) and 0.24% of the more vulnerable, adult teachers have caught it. For this our children have lost nearly a year of education and parents have lost their jobs, career tracks, some of them their homes and businesses. If you can get past the paywall, read about it at End the School Shutdown by the Wall Street Journal, or, if you can't, read it at Dailywire.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention revealed Wednesday that young adults aged 25-44 years saw the largest increase in “excess” deaths from previous years, a stunning 26.5% jump. . . . [Y]oung people are at very low risk for COVID-19 fatality — 20-49-year-olds have a 99.98% chance of surviving the virus, per CDC data . . . . “I would suspect that a good portion of the deaths in that younger cohort were deaths due to despair, due to other reasons,” admitted Gottlieb (see video below). “We’ve seen a spike in overdoses, and I would suspect that a good portion of those excess deaths in that younger cohort were from drug overdoses and other deaths that were triggered by some of the implications of we’ve gone through to try to deal with COVID-19.” (New CDC Numbers Show Lockdown’s Deadly Toll On Young People, click through to read the CDC publication Excess Deaths Associated with COVID-19, by Age and Race and Ethnicity)
For more 7 Quick Takes Friday, check out This Ain't the Lyceum.
I'm glad you and Chris were able to vote early as I was wondering how that would work this year with Thomas and his chemo schedule. Washington is a 100% vote-by-mail state, and has been for probably 8 years now, so it was a nice surprise to just get ballots in the mail box for the primary during the first August we lived here. (We had checked a box on our driver's license applications when we got Washington ones.) It's actually a really nice way to do it because there's a website we can visit to see when our ballot is processed, and I can vote while looking up candidate information online. With all of the freaking out this year over voting by mail, a lot of people have used the county dropboxes instead, and something like 45% of my county voted in the first week after ballots were mailed out.
ReplyDelete