Chemo & Blood & Platelets

Brax had another good round of chemo on Tuesday. It was a 1hr IV treatment with PEG. This is the one that wiped her out pretty good on day 4. She handled it much better this time around. It still knocked her down a bit, but she was not as weak and tired as before. Her hemoglobin was a bit low too, so they did do a blood transfusion after the chemo treatment. Brax has not had any issues with those and they seem to give her a nice boost once done.

We also sat down with Melissa to discuss Brax’s road map moving forward. We have another 5 weeks of this current phase (two 28-day cycles – mirror image of each other) and once this is complete and we start the next phase we will have our ‘official’ end date, which will be 2-years from the start of the next phase. It’s long, but at the same time exciting to see the end. And, the last 18 months are a lot less intensive, which we are all looking forward too. Melissa also said that the initial 6 week break they were going to give Brax on her lumbar punctures and IT chemo treatments they are going to revise and now do one again at the start of the next 28-day cycle. The reason being, now that they have things all clear and don’t anticipate any issues, they don’t want to wait 6 weeks with NO treatment. And even though Brax is getting IV chemo weekly, along with pills and shots, none of this treatment is directly treating the spinal fluid/CNS as it doesn’t penetrate the blood brain barrier. We, collectively, are all on board with adding the treatment and being overly cautious/proactive, especially seeing that Brax handles them so well and has little to no side effects.

Also, her platelets were a bit low Tuesday (which is normal), but not at the point of needing a transfusion, however, Melissa thought after this round of chemo and already being low, she would probably need one soon. She had us come back today to check. They were just below the threshold, which we all anticipated, so she did get a platelet transfusion this afternoon. This was her first time getting these and, again, things went very smoothly. It goes about twice as fast as blood, taking only 1hr instead of 2hrs. We had never seen platelets so were surprised they were so yellowish looking……pretty thick and sticky too – kinda nasty! Brax said they look like a mango smoothie (fyi – not us!)

After going thru all of this, it is truly amazing what they are able do with modern medicine! We are so thankful!

Brax being the rockstar she is on her way to get platelets.
Brax during her platelet transfusion. You can see the color of the bag – surprising?!?
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