Third time lucky

Shanean goes back to hospital on Monday due to a relapse of the cancer. Deep down Shanean never really thought we got it all last time and turns out it she was right

Confiding in her hospital appointed counsellor a few weeks ago, Shanean brought up the fact that she cannot relax as she knew something was there and things werent right. The next scheduled scan was not for another three months, but Shanean asked the professor if she could have one sooner, to which he thankfully agreed, even if he was probably doing it more as a calmative measure.

He was a little surprised to see the scan come back "abnormal" a few days later. Her last clear scan was only 8 weeks before

It has come back aggressively - it is on her left side from her hip to her lung - the speed of relapse and rate of growth has the Professor concerned.

After consulting with his collegues they have decided to treat Shanean as a "Burkitts" lymphoma patient. This is a rare form of cancer and the fastest growing tumour around. Although she is officially diagnosed as a "Diffuse Large B cell" non-hodgkins lymphoma it appears to be behaving more like Burkitts and will be treated as such

The treatment involves:
1. Admission to hospital and 16 days intensive chemotherapy,
2. approx 2 weeks recovery,
3. another hospital admission for 8 days of chemo
4. approx two weeks recovery
5. a few full body radiation sessions (this is new)
6. scan to see if the cancer is gone
7. If it goes away then a stem cell transplant will be done again - this time using donor stem cells from her sister Christene
8. If the scans are not clear, the chemo and radiation cycles will be repeated, as a clear scan is required before the transplant can be done.

They are also concerned of this spreading into her nervous system and blood stream so she needs injections of chemo directly into her bone marrow (intra thecal), via lumbar punctures/injections into her spine - during the first round of chemo

Its extreme stuff with risks attached. The main problem with donor stem cell transplants is graft vs host disease (GvHd). Similar to when people get donor organs sometimes the body sees these as alien and rejects it. In GvHD, the new donor stemcells (and with it, new immune system) sees the recipient's body as foreign and attacks it. One in five people who get donor transplants die from this within a year. This is what we are facing.

The Good News 1
The double edged sword of GvHd is that if there is a level of rejection then the cancer cells are also rejected and killed off - in a bizzare sort of way we would like this to happen - in a mild form I suppose. Enough so you can survive

The Good News 2
When testing Christene as a donor the results were a perfect match with a 6 out of 6 match of the protiens they can test. This doesnt eliminate the risk altogether as they cannot test for everything, but it does definately reduce it.

If, after all this, it does come back again, it will be trial drugs to see if anything new can help

Feeling Stuff
Anger - its not fair to the kids - the goal is to shelter them from the disruption as much as possible, Joel is too little, but Nessie knows
Anger - We had a trip booked to go to Bali to try and get back a sense of normality which we had to cancel. Just a nice holiday would be nice
Relief - knowing is better than not knowing - Shanean knew all along - I didnt
Confidence - it will work this time - like she knew it didnt last time. So its calm and we are in simple operational, practical mode