Chemo #4



After an exciting morning, exhaustion set in

Sorry for the delay in getting these posts up.  Max had his fourth treatment on Monday and we had a busy day planned,  the team wanted Max to have another appointment with a specialist in the afternoon so they were hoping that we could shorten the infusion time to make it a shorter day and allow us to get in and see this specialist who usually has a 6 month waiting list to get in to see him.  When we got to the hospital early in the morning we got everything going pretty fast, but our team hadn't communicated to the nurses or oncology pharmacist the infusion rate that needed to be kept in order to cut down Max's time, so there was some discussion about the rate.  After getting our premeds and clearance from the hospital to get an exception to shave a few hours off,  the infusion commenced, they turned up the rate and we settled in for a long day.  However, within a couple minutes of turning the rate up Max started to cough a couple times and then started gagging like he was throwing up, I turned around to grab the vomit basin and then when I turned back around it seemed I had the whole unit in our room, at the time I didn't realize what was happening but all the doctors and nurses knew what to be looking for and knew what was going on.  Max's stats were dropping and he was having a reaction.  It seems his throat was closing on him from the infusion, I guess this can be common, but it came on so fast I wasn't expecting it to start with just one cough.  He didn't even have time to tell us what was going on and of course he was so scared he couldn't even point or show us what was wrong.  Luckily they had oxygen handy and a shot of epinepherine close by to help, they also immediately shut off the infusion.  We had a little scare, but after some observation time and lots of discussion whether to continue the chemo, we decided on the new premeds to be given to try to protect against this in the future and then we gave it another try,  I guess Max is a low and slow kinda guy,  I cancelled the rest of Max's appointments, and they kept us for observation until the unit shut down for the evening at 7pm. The rest of the day went much smoother.



Corndogs make everything feel better for a two year old....