Poor Henry can't catch a break. He was felled this week by the stomach flu. Normally he's pretty quick to fight those things off, but he was down and out from Wednesday through Friday this week. William was sick as well but seemed to bounce back a lot more quickly this time.
Henry barely ate anything while he was sick, which made for an easy segue to the Low Iodine Diet that he is now on in preparation for his Radioactive Iodine Treatment. It has been scheduled for Wednesday, February 17th at the Huntsman Cancer Hospital. He'll be admitted for a day or so and then be released to further isolation. Aunt Laura is graciously offering us the use of her home for those days so Henry can just camp out in a single room and a bathroom while he is, for lack of a better term, radioactive. It's a generous offer and actually works out well for everyone, since she's taking a well-deserved vacation that weekend anyway. This will work out better than bringing him home, since William and Tessa can basically stay with their normal routines and not worry about having to keep their distance from Henry.
Speaking of the Low Iodine Diet, it's harder than I thought it would be. He can't eat anything with dairy or egg yolks or with iodized salt. That cuts out most commercially prepared foods. That heavens for the Low Iodine Cookbook from thyca.org - so far Henry likes the muffins and finds the cinnamon bread and sesame chicken nuggets so-so. He's been a good sport so far, but then again I'm not sure his appetite is fully back from the flu last week. I have a feeling that by the time we've been on this diet for another week he'll be losing his patience with his food choices. We promised him a huge cheese pizza after this was all over.
I think I should probably be a little more freaked out about the details of this treatment than I am. A Nuclear Medicine doctor will administer the dose of radioactive iodine to him and then he'll be confined to a lead-lined room until the radiation specialists at the hospital determine that he's OK to leave. He'll be given an anti-nausea medication since the treatment can cause nausea and they really, really don't want him to throw up, given that it would be hazardous material and all. Every time I talk to a doctor on the phone I remind them of his age and that we won't just be able to leave him on his own for 24 hours. I'm hopeful that Jay and I can sit across the room from him after a time and we plan to stay with him that night, although I'm not sure how that all will work. Worst case scenario is that we take turns sitting in his doorway if we still can't get too close by the time he is ready to go to sleep. I guess we'll see. It makes me uncomfortable to be signing up for a treatment that actually puts a dose of radioactive medicine into an 8 year old's body but the alternative isn't any better. We either treat it aggressively so that he has the best chance of being cancer free or we wait and see and hope that it doesn't spread, which given the lymph node involvement that we saw from his pathology report isn't likely. It might be years before it shows up but the odds would be good that it would and then it would be harder to treat. So we treat him and hope that the long term effects aren't too bad.
My dear friend Melissa blogged about things that she wonders about and one of those things is "why do kids get cancer." That has been on my mind a lot lately as well. When I'm really feeling down I am convinced it's something that I did when I was pregnant with him. But I know that it was probably just the luck of the genetic draw, a fluke in his DNA that caused his cells to go crazy. And so we just move forward and do the best we can to kill those cells so that he can go on and live a long, productive life.
One thing is for sure, the stomach flu didn't seem too bad this time. Normally I hate when my kids have the stomach flu, but I just kept thinking, "It's no big deal, it's just the stomach flu. It'll go away." Hopefully I can say that about Henry's thyroid cancer one day - "It was no big deal - we treated it and it went away." I look forward to that day.
1 comment:
Beautiful. You are going to go back and read this someday and wonder how you made it through. I'm wondering how your making it through too. When you write it down it it scary. I am sorry that this is in your life right now. Be Strong, I know you will. ANd remember to cry a little and then get up and out your lipstick on and keep going! I love your little family and will continue to pray for your home to have the strenght and peace that you all need right now.
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