Waiting.

The last time I left you we were planning on doing RICE down here in Vegas, but as the days went on the plans started to change. On Friday, Dr. Zhou (Donnies dr. in Vegas) spoke with Dr. Morbacher (USC dr.) and she had spoke with some of her colleagues at USC and they had discussed some different treatment plans for Donnie. They discussed the pros and cons to RICE and all the other chemo treatments there are. After putting all their heads together they decided that maybe ESHAP would be a better treatment for him. They think that he will respond better to this because he has never had any of the drugs that are in this one and with RICE he has already had a couple of the drugs that are in it. The only concern is that his Cancer cells have built up a tolerance to those drugs that are in RICE so they don't want to give it to him again. So on Monday, we had a appointment with Dr. Zhou to go over getting started. He said that Donnie will be admitted to the hospital for 2 weeks. The first 4 days he will get a continuous 24 hour infusion of ESHAP and he will also get Prophylactic treatment on day 2 and day 8. The Prophylactic treatment is chemo that they administer through his spine and into his fluid. His lymphoma is following his nervous system and infiltrating into his brain where his forehead is. So they want to make sure they prevent that from getting any worse. The rest of the 2 weeks they will keep him there for monitoring. They said his white blood cells will be really low and they want to make sure that he doesn't develop Febrile Neotropenia, which is just an infection from low white cells. Donnie was suppose to be admitted to the hospital on Monday night but our insurance didn't authorize the treatment till Tuesday. Then we needed to wait for a room to open so he could be admitted but we are still waiting. They were suppose to have something open yesterday but then they said today and today they told us probably not till tomorrow. So annoying! Story of our lives.. waiting. I feel like that's all we do is wait. Do this first, then do this, then you can do that, its like never ending! So as soon as he gets there and settled, I will give some more updates.