Monday, July 18, 2005

The wait is over! Now the fight begins.

We didn't want to wait one more minute to let you all know that the waiting is over, and we now know what we are fighting.

Mei-Rose visited with Dr. Glaser today. She gained some weight and is now 32 pounds. He had some test results to share with us.

The pathologist that the bone sample was sent to- has positively identified the cell that he needed to see- in order to make the Histiocytosis diagnosis final. Now that we know what to research, we have lots of homework to do on Langerhans Cell Histiocytosis (LCH).

Today- Dr. Glaser explained the game plan to us as the following.

1. Mei-Rose will go for a skelatal survey on Wednesday, July 20,2005. This will help determine if the lessions are getting larger or smaller, and if they are increasing or decreasing in number. ***There is a chance that this survey could indicate that the bones are already healing. If the healing is significant, we stop here at this stage and continue to monitor Mei-Rose. If not, we proceed with step 2.

2. On July 28, 2005, Mei-Rose will undergo a surgical procedure to place a "port" in her chest. The port is used to administer the chemotherapy medications through the IV. A port is used rather than a traditional IV if medications are going to be used for an extended length of time. This eliminates the need to start an IV every week for 6 months. When this is complete and the port area is healed, we will then move on to step 3.

3. We don't have as much information on this as we would like but this is what we know so far. She will undergo 6 months of chemotherapy with two drugs. One called Vinblastine. The other is an oral medication that you all are probably familiar with. It is called Prednisone or methylprednisolone. The Vinblastine will be administered through the port and the Prednisone is oral.

As we digest all this information and make sense of it, there will be more questions for us to ask our daughter's team. Until there is more info..........Mahalo for your thoughts and prayers.

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