First Round Completed!

Elizabeth will be coming home today, having completed her first round of this course of chemotherapy. She is doing very well. Children's Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) has a McDonald's restaurant on its first floor, and it seems that while Elizabeth "isn't hungry" when the hospital food arrives, she does get hungry for McDonald's. She had her first Big Mac on Thursday night (her first night at CHLA), along with fries and some chicken nuggets. Apparently she found her appetite at 10:00pm, and Dad was happy to oblige.

Upon arriving at CHLA, we met with Dr. Malogolowkin and our nurse case worker Patricia Rios to discuss Elizabeth's treatment. She will get GEMOX chemoterapy for 2 rounds, then a CT scan to see if she is responding to treatment. At that point we will discuss continuing more chemo. Her AFP level was 1460 on Thursday. It was 735 on March 16, only 8 days earlier. Now hopefully the chemo will start bringing it back down (an AFP of 5 is normal) as the cancer cells are killed off.

Elizabeth started her 90 minute infusion of gemcitabine at 11:00pm on Thursday, March 24. She tolerated it very well. No nausea or vomiting, although she was cranky as ever on Friday (her anti-nausea medicine decadron does that to her). Mom, Mike, Matt, and Danny spent the entire afternoon with Elizabeth and Dad at the hospital. Matt and Elizbeth had a great time in the play room with the foam paint. Pretty cool stuff--just like colored shaving cream. Elizabeth thought it looked like pink hair mousse, so you can guess what happened there... her hair is a very lovely shade of pink, though. She was also visited by a friend of a friend (who also works at CHLA and is very good to know!), Maureen, who brought Elizabeth a new baby doll and Care Bear. Unfortunately, Elizabeth was in her cranky fiesty mood and was rather rude. We'll have to make a point to visit Maureen when Elizabeth is more like her normal self so she can meet the "real" Elizabeth.

Last night (Friday) she got the 2 hours of oxaliplatin started at around 5:30pm. She was a little nauseated from that one, but all in all she took it much better than most do. She is scheduled for discharge this morning (YAY!) and will be home so the Easter Bunny can find her here instead of at the hospital. If she is feeling up to it, we will dye Easter eggs later this afternoon.

Thank you all for your thoughts and prayers. We are very hopeful that we'll see some positive results. So far, so good...