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Chemotherapy - Week 1

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Now that I am sufficiently healed from my surgery, I get to start my 6 months of Chemotherapy. Apparently there are lots of chemo medicines...a little fact that I didn't know.  I will be using Taxol and Carboplatin with the following schedule:  Week 1 - Taxol and Carbo combined; Weeks 2 & 3 - Taxol only; Week 4 - Off! I do expect to lose my hair somewhere between day 14-17.  A sweet friend who just finished chemotherapy for breast cancer threw me a hat/scarf party to help prepare for that.  It was such a great time to talk with friends and learn ways to cover my soon-to-be bald head!  I'm surprisingly ok with losing my hair. Of course, I haven't seen my bald head yet, so I imagine that might change.  The good news is that I'll be nice and cool this summer and, for the first time, I will get to experiment with hair styles of all lengths this fall! I just finished my first infusion on Thursday, March 23. I was more nervous for chemo than I was for my ...
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Good News!

I have some great news I want to share!  Last week marked the beginning of the 4th month of Chemo. Because I had passed the half-way point, a new blood test was taken to see where my cancer markers were.  This is done to make sure that the chemo is doing its job.  The cancer marker test for Ovarian Cancer is the CA-125 test.  A normal range for CA-125 is below 35.  When I was first diagnosed, my score was 668.  After surgery, right before I first round of chemo, my score had dropped to 194.  As of last week, my latest score is a whopping 32! I haven't actually talked to my oncologist yet...I just pulled this score from my lab report online. When I was in the hospital following surgery, an oncologist came to visit with me and told me that the best outcomes happen when the CA-125 test is in the normal range at the half-way point of chemo.  That is what I have been praying and hoping for and I'm so relieved to see that it has happened! I look for...
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NICU

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Savanna completed her routine bilirubin test the day we were to be discharged from the hospital. However, rather than getting the news that all is well and going home, we learned that her levels were critically high and that she would need to go straight to NICU. She had a positive Coombs test, which meant that her high levels were a result of a blood incompatibility between me and her. There were a few options on the table to treat her, including doing a blood transfusion. They opted to treat her with as many phototherapy lights as possible and see what happened that night. If her levels didn't go down w/in 12 hours, they would probably do the transfusion. Luckily, her levels dropped out of the critical zone that first night. Her levels have been dropping more slowly now and she remains in NICU. She has been a real trooper during this time. Apparently, most babies hate the phototherapy lights because they can't be held and have to stay in there 24/7 and they cry all day...
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