commencement

Yesterday was a big day. It started with the bone marrow biopsy at 10.30am - Shanean dreaded this one a lot (refer earlier blog) - the procedure involves basically drilling into the hip bone, sucking out some bone marrow and then breaking off a bit of bone so the appropriate samples can be sent away for testing.

The last time this happened she was an outpatient which meant no anaethesia (as this would require taking up a bed in the recovery ward) so this time we asked for her to be knocked out completely - the hospital was good and could see her anxiety so reluctantly agreed. It did mean being wheeled down to an operating theatre and being treated like a full operation but it was worth it as she was knocked out enough to make the experience far less traumatic - she wasnt fully asleep but drugged out enough to not care which was good.

There was a student nurse from the University of Tasmania who was watching the procedure and nearly fainted from the experience so this pretty much proved that is wasnt Shanean being prescious - its bloody horrible

Anyway, with that out of the way, after a nice lunch, she recieved the first chemo dose via IV - she has had this chemical before - its a bright purple liquid (same colour as a red gatorade) injected into her "PICC" line which is a tube inserted into the arm that follows her veins up past her neck into her chest.

Then after that it was the first lumbar punch/spinal tap thing which was done at her bed. It involved sitting up hunched over a pillow whilst they shoved a needle in her spine which extracted spinal fluid (for testing) and injecting chemo at the same time. It wasnt near as bad as the biopsy in theory, but anything related to the spine still causes a bit of anxiety so it wasnt an easy experience. These procedures will be more common - the next one is Monday. Spinal fluid is as clear as water - they took three test tubes of this at 10 drops per tube.

Today was calmer - only one bag of chemo over an hour. I took the kids up to visit her today and she had a splitting headache (a common side effect of spinal taps - taking the fluid out causes some sort of imbalance) but the full chemo side effects hadnt kicked in yet. She had slept all day which is good.

When she was wheeled to the operating theatre they sent all her medical files with her on the bed - needless to say these files are huge and nearly require a trolley of their own (from memory she is up to admission number 16) so whilst she was asleep I figured I may as well read them due to the lack of magazines and it seems she is definately being treated as a Burkitts lymphoma (rather than the diffuse large B cell that she is officially diagnosed as) and the aggressive form of it as well (even though she doesnt display the typical aggressive Burkitts characteristics). So its good in a way to know that they are pulling out the big guns and appear to be taking a slightly non-traditional approach.