Treatment begins

To start the treatment process, Maggie had a spinal puncture to draw spinal fluid and to insert some chemo into her spinal column. They found that the leukemia had not reached her nervous system as the spinal fluid was clean. That was a very good thing. Formal chemotherapy started the next day. . The plan was to give a series of intense chemotherapy treatments, a combination of different chemo. drugs and to check the progress after 7 days.

Some of the drugs made Maggie nauseous, others weren't as bad. In general, she didn't seem to feel too well throughout those days (of course). One of the challenges of treating leukemia with infants is the difficulty of communication. If she is crying or fussy, how do we know if she is sick to her stomach, if she is in pain (and where), if she is hungry, or sleepy?

At diagnosis, they found 80% leukemic cells in her bone marrow. After 7 days, she had more bone marrow drawn and they found that she responded very well to the chemo. In fact, there were no visible leukemic cells in the marrow at all. This was another good sign for her treatment and recovery. It also meant that we could plan to stay on the current treatment and not have to consider other, riskier treatment options.

From there, we went home with instructions to give her medicine through her IV. We had been in the hospital for 10 days, and hoped that we would be home for two and a half weeks until her next heavy dose of chemo. As a result of the chemo, her white blood counts and ANC (Absolute Neutrophil Count, an important immune system measure), were essentially at zero. We would have to be very careful to avoid illness--Maggie is vulnerable to infection when her counts are low. The goals for our time at home were to let her white blood counts recover, to avoid complications, and to rest and enjoy some "normalcy." Of course, our new normal is not quite what we were used to just days before.