Thursday, July 18, 2013

Postponed

Mia's splenectomy was scheduled for Friday July 19th.  We met with the surgeon yesterday and she explained how they do the surgery.  They make 4 small incisions, the largest being about an inch and a half.  then they detach all the small blood vessels and the one large blood vein.  the large one the staple shut and is the only real issue.  If they don't get it just right then it can bleed and they will have to make a larger incision in order to stop the bleeding.  But once the spleen is disconnected from everything, they put a bag in Mia and carefully maneuver the spleen into it.  Then they break up the spleen into little pieces inside the bag and pull it all out through the largest incision.  The surgery should take 2-3 hours and Mia should only have to stay in the hospital 2-3 days.  Because of her low red and white blood cell counts the surgeon wanted her to get more blood today and she will have platelets running into her during the surgery.

So today we were at the clinic for 8 hours receiving red blood cells.

Mia has had a lot of diarrhea for the last couple of weeks.  The docs wanted a sample to test her for C-diff.  Today they got their sample and the test was done and she is positive for C-diff.  Unfortunately once the surgeon heard she immediately said we had to postpone surgery until Mia was all better.  Phone calls were made and the immunologist didn't feel like we needed to wait for a full 10 day course of antibiotics to treat the c-diff.  In the end, the decision was made to put off her surgery until the antibiotics start helping her, probably a couple or three days.  Monday I will let them know how Mia is doing and hopefully the surgery will happen on Monday or Tuesday.

Let's just say I was a little frustrated this afternoon.  But I can only trust that the Lord knows what he is doing, because I sure don't!

Saturday, July 13, 2013

No Transplant Yet

During the week of the fourth, Mia had a bone marrow biopsy and PET and CT scans to see how the cancer was responding.  We met with Dr Camilo her oncologist to review the results on Mon the 8th.  Her Marrow and scans are all clear!  This is good news and means the transplant is definitely on.  So then we were waiting for word from the transplant team from Primary Childrens' to let us know when to come down.  I expected to going down last week for physicals, blood work and any other preliminary tests to be done on both Jessica and Mia.  But there was an issue that I wasn't aware of.  Finally on Friday I got the word.

Mia's spleen is still larger than it should be.  Apparently there is some concern that it is sequestering white blood cells and platelets making it very hard for the doctors to trust the blood counts that we get with regular testing.  One of the doctors in Salt Lake checked with another lymphoma "expert" and the suggestion was made that she should have her spleen taken out before transplant. Of course there are pros and cons with removing her spleen.  They will try to do the surgery laparascopically, however that may be difficult because of the size of her spleen and also because of her extremely low platelet count.  This is a fairly serious surgery at the best of times and Mia's body is already not in very good condition.  We should  be doing the surgery this Thursday or Friday.  Then there will be a week or two at least of recovery time.

Because her cancer is so aggressive, and there will have been more than a month since her last chemotherapy treatment, there is a possibility that she will need another round before transplant.  So we are back to the waiting game as far as transplant goes.  We won't be going down to Salt Lake before the first week of August.

Because we thought we were leaving next week, we scheduled a little open house at our house on Sunday between 4 and six.  Mia misses her friends and would like to see people.  So come by if you like.  Please don't bring gifts or sick germs.