Childhood Cancer Awareness Video

Regular readers of this blog are aware of the Unknown Son's continuing treatment for cancer. While I try not to post about his illness and treatment too much, I do talk about it (and related topics) from time to time.

Here's a great video someone put together for National Cancer Awareness Month (it's actually September). My sister lost her oldest son recently to the same cancer that Unknown Son originally had (neuroblastoma), and she linked to it on her site


If it touches you, consider making a contribution. There are are many good groups that are supporting research on childhood cancer. One of the best is Curesearch, which is associated with the Childrens Oncology Group and the National Childhood Cancer Foundation.

The Unknown Son's Cancer Treatment

It's been a month since I wrote that the Unknown Son had been diagnosed with cancer, so I thought an update was in order. It took a while to get everything straight, but we now have our answers, and a pretty good idea as to what the next few months will involve.

Unknown Son has a stage 3 Wilm's tumor, which is one of the "better" types of cancer to have (it has five year survival rate exceeding 90% for most variants). It might seem strange to put comparative terms like "better" with cancer, but compared to neuroblastoma (his cancer the first titme around), this is a relatively straightforward thing to treat. Here's what the treatment will involve:

• A couple of weeks back, he had a surgical port installed, which makes getting chemo, blood draws, and other input/output pretty easy and relatively painless. It was accessed for the first time this last week for his first round of chemo, and it was probably the easiest injections he's had since we can remember - they numb the skin over the port with some analgesic cream and put a needle through the port into the vein, and he hardly noticed it).
• He had his first round of chemo this week (more details below), and seemed to tolerate it pretty well. There was some nausea later on in the week, but much less than we'd expected.
  
• He also had his first two doses of low-level radiation (again, without much problem).

Here's what's ahead for the little guy: He gets about 25 weeks of chemo, involving three drugs: Vincristine, Actinomycin, and Doxyrubicin. He gets the Vincristin every week, and will alternate the other two drugs (i.e. for every three week cycle he gets Vincristine and Actinimycin on week one,Vincristine and Doxyrubicin on week two, and Vincristine alone on week 3 ). They alternate the meds because some of them take a few weeks for the body to recover from.

He also receives low-level targeted radiation for six days. He had two doses last week (Thursday and Friday), and will have four this week.

So far, he's had a bit of nausea the last day or two, but a couple doses of Zophran appeared to control it pretty well. We really don't know if it's from the chemo or from the virus the Unknown Daughter has had this week. But either way, the meds seemed to work. He's also had some mouth sores, but the analgesic mouthwash they gave (it primarily contains lidocaine and benadryl) did the trick.

So looking ahead, he'll be getting radiation every day next week and then chemo once a week for the next six months or so. The chemo will typically be scheduled on an "off teaching" day (I teach on a TuTh schedule this semester), so I'll be able to make most of the chemo appointments.

I'll keep you posted as to how it goes.

One Kidney (and One Tumor) Gone, and He's Going Strong

Unknown Son went under the knife today. And a long day it was.

We got to the hospital by 9:30, and had him on the table by around 11 or so. They completed the first step of the surgery - made a small incision, cut a piece of the mass off, and examined it (by about 1:00 or so).

The good news is that, while it is cancer of some sort, it does NOT appear to be recurrent neuroblastoma. The surgeon said that it seems at first look to be either a mesoblastic nephroma or a sarcoma (we don't know much about these types of cancers, so we'll get back to you with more information later). However, both these possibilities are far less serious than recurrent neuroblastoma, so we take it as good news. We won't know for sure until the full pathologist report comes back, probably on Thursday or Friday.

The next step was to remove the kidney (a "nephrectomy" in medical terms). It took quite a while -- about 7 hours (rather than the expected 4) because of the scar tissue from his previous surgery and radiation. But that's just fine with us - the surgeon wasn't in a rush to get home, so we'd rather he took as long as necessary.

The Little Guy is resting comfortably in the PIC (Pediatric Intensive Care) unit. He'd better be with all the drugs they pumped into him. In fact, since he's got a breathing tube, they'll keep him well sedated until tomorrow morning at the earliest. So, he's sleeping about as soundly as possible, and probably a lot better than his folks.

He's comfortable, and there won't be anything happening until morning. So, since She Who Must Be Obeyed and I will probably have our share of sleep-deprived nights in the near future, we took the option of going home to sleep in our own bed. We'll come back in the morning for the waking of the lad and the removal of the tube.

Unknown Son has lately gotten interested in Greek Mythology ( was a big fan when I was his age, and I think I gave him the bug), so I'm sure I'll be reading some (actually, a lot of) stories from the books on mythology I got from the library yesterday (we figured he'd be here for a while, so we did plan ahead).

Stay tuned - I'll update when we know more.