DI

Tomorrow, Mollie begins delayed intensification (DI). This phase lasts about 6 weeks. Here is the list of chemotherapy drugs she will be getting:

Vincristine
Dexamethasone
Doxorubicin
PEG Asparaginase
Cyclophosphamide
Cytarabine
Thioguanine
Methotrexate

She will get most of these multiple times during this phase. All of them can have serious side effects. And they all kill cancer. The goal of this phase is to use new, more toxic drugs to kill any leukemic cells that may have escaped the induction and consolidation phases. So there we are. Without this phase and the 2 years of maintenance that follow, most leukemias relapse. I've been reading a lot, and the subject of relapse always seems to come up. I just can't go there mentally. It's hard, but I think the only way to deal with this is to take it as it comes. Of course that doesn't mean I'm not worried.

Because we expect that Mollie's blood counts (red cells, white cells, and/or platelets) will drop in the coming weeks as a result of the chemo, we have been trying to get in a lot of fun stuff the last week or so.

We celebrated Lucy's 9 month birthday (wow, how did that happen?!) with a trip to the pumpkin patch last week. The weather was beautiful and we had a lovely time. Mollie already had a pumpkin so she picked out some decorative squash.

This weekend, Mollie and Isabella had a lot of playtime together and they thoroughly enjoyed it (no fights!!). They had their first German lesson and learned the parts of the face and colors. We also made "scarecrows" out of pine straw and some of Bella's old clothes. They turned out cute, but girls enjoyed painting the faces on the pumpkins more than stuffing the clothes with pine straw.

Not sure how Halloween will go. Mollie is excited, but she doesn't know she has to get two painful, intramuscular asparaginase shots in her legs the morning of Halloween.