Day 99
It was a busy day for a holiday. We started bright and early and 8am. The first event of the day was to go to the doctor’s office for Neupogen shots. Even with fairly decent blood counts, the doctor feels that Neupogen is needed to keep counts high. The shots have varied from excruciating bone pain to hardly any pain at all. Afterwards, we drove 1.5 hours to Los Angeles to meet with her mother. When we got there we ate a quick lunch and went to run errands such as getting groceries. By the time we got back it was time to head of to Cedars Sinai for our second opinion. The drive took about an hour before we arrived and we waited another hour to be seen. The doctor was very well educated and provided very confident information for all of us. He reassured us that our current plan was a good course to take. He also assured us that it was alright to discontinue Bleomycin from our chemo regimen. He also mentioned that Neupogen was a good idea to continue due to the fact that Hodgkin’s is so curable and we wouldn’t want Jackie to suffer from any type of secondary infection due to low immunity. Jackie later in turn asked him how one gets Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Of course there is no definite answer, but he actually theorized that Hodgkin’s seem to be found in higher economic classes, in higher educated people, and people who were extremely clean when growing up. He mentioned that our bodies own immune system fends off many organisms, when one is too sheltered from bacteria our bodies are not able to learn how to fight off organisms. Of course, these are all theories and will take much studying before being proven, nevertheless it was very interesting. After that we drove an hour back to her mother’s house and had dinner, then another 1.5 hours back home.
All in on, this trip was so worth it. Even though our oncologist is very competent, the human mind always favors reassurance. We were all extremely pleased to hear that Jackie was getting all the correct care. To ease the mind of worries will definitely keep her body focused on fighting the cancerous cells.