Salt Lake City--At Last!

We're finally at home in Salt Lake City!  Exhibit A:

We have a house

And exhibit B:

With the house we inherited a cat

Proof positive that we now have a home here.

We had an appointment at Primary Children's today with Dr. Barnette, Kaitlyn's new doctor.  When he walked in the exam room he said, "At last!"  No kidding!  Dr. Barnette was a med student of Dr. Moore's (her UCLA doc) back in the 90's, so we had already had a good report on him and he is a very nice man.  On to the medical update:

Dr. Barnette explained that  AML patients are classified as low, intermediate, or high risk depending on the likelihood of relapse determined initially by certain chromosomal indicators.   The plan of treatment is determined largely by this classification.  Patients in the high risk group go on to bone marrow transplant with any compatible donor that can be found.  The low risk group's treatment involves four rounds of chemotherapy labelled Induction 1, Induction 2, Intensification 1, and Intensification 2.  The patients in the intermediate group--I got the impression that this was the largest percentage--are eventually assigned to one of the other groups based on their response to the chemo courses.  Because Kaitlyn's pathology was so good after the first round of chemo and her bone marrow biopsy, (they were unable to find any leukemic cells to an accuracy of .01%), she is now classified as low risk.  This does not completely rule out the possibility of a transplant in the future, but the chance of needing one has gone from likely to...much less likely.

I mentioned that I had been told that transplant recipients had the best chance of a complete cure.  Dr. Barnette said that they have a 1.5% better cure rate than the treatment for the low risk patients.  He also said that the chemo regimen for patients that go to transplant is much more intense and has the highest chance of permanent future complications resulting from the chemo itself.  

Meanwhile, Kaitlyn had a blood draw and ALL of her counts are now in normal range which means two things: 1-she is off all precautions other than to wash her hands frequently (something we all should do), and 2- she's ready to start Induction 2 which is scheduled for Monday.  The doctor said that with AML it is important to hit it hard right at the beginning, and although it would be nice to be able to let her stay out until Christmas he just wasn't comfortable with that.  In fact, most patients only get a week in between chemo rounds, but Kait will have 2 weeks.  After that it will be eight days of chemo and another month in the hospital waiting for her counts to come back up.

After all was said and done I did what any good mother would do, I got online and bought tickets to the IMAX showing of The Hobbit for tomorrow afternoon. Yup.  Right there in the doctor's office.