Hospital visit, steroid-week and a brand new tooth

This morning was day 1 of 5 for steroids this month, so this morning I had a quick chat with Bianca's teacher to warn her that there might be a couple of side-effects to deal with this week. I got Bianca from school early today and then we headed off to the city, first to Terence's work (as he needed the car to get Caitlyn from daycare) and he dropped us off at the hospital for our monthly appointment.

I was thinking today that a large portion of our treatment has always included a lot of waiting. In hindsight I think it would have been interesting to know just how many hours we have been waiting to date, but I never actually ever recorded the exact waiting time throughout our treatment.

So we got there, did our blood test and waited for an hour and during that time, Bianca and I went to the Ronald McDonald room and had some lunch and then at around 1:55pm we went to Clinic for our 2pm appointment. We then waited probably until 2:15pm before we managed to see our doctor. It was a pretty good visit. Bianca's counts are all excellent. Well, actually Bianca's neutrophils are way too high and our doctor has increased Bianca's chemo to 100% dose. It was during this visit that I noticed Bianca has a tooth coming out behind one of her baby teeth at the bottom. Our doctor is not too worried that the baby tooth hasn't fallen out as yet, so we'll just keep an eye on it.

And then we waited until they were ready for us up at the ward where they currently do the actual treatment stuff. Finally at 3:30pm we were on the ward and Bianca was accessed pretty quickly and then we waited in the waiting area by the nurse's station until a bed became available in the day stay room. And then once we were settled in the day stay room we waited for our 2.5 hour IVIG to run through. During that time Bianca had a brief moment where she seemed a bit on the grumpy side, not too interested in eating her supper (but she did finish it which was great) and then by the time we went home she had cheered up again.

Bianca and I had to take the bus home and just our luck, they are doing loads of roadworks in the street just outside the hospital where we would normally catch the bus and so we had quite a bit of a walk to the busstop. We walked over the Grafton Bridge which is currently closed for car traffic, but open for pedestrians and cyclists and Bianca first loved watching the cars go on the motorway below the bridge and then at one point wondered why I did not bring her and her dad's bicycle so that the two of us could cycle to the other end.

We are due back at the hospital on the 3rd of March for another blood test to see how the increase in chemo would affect Bianca's counts and other than that we are now just waiting to see what this week's steroids will bring.