Khloe 1/25/22

Update

It has been quite a while since I have been able to sit down and write at all, much less think about writing. I started back to work, which has been an adjustment in and of itself. To begin with, it is hard to wake up and invest my time and energy in other people’s children knowing my daughter is at home going through what she is going through and I am not there to take care of her or support her. Granted, Tiatan moved home recently to help and my mom is there most days, but it isn’t the same. So, anytime I am home now, I spend it talking to Khloe about her day, how she feels, and then of course doing the things that need to be done. But for the most part and overall, Khloe is doing well. Her nausea is not as intense or consistent as it was early on in her treatment, even though it’s still present. She experiences fatigue, but she has spurts of energy and she will get up during the day instead of laying in bed or on the couch, and she is doing more school work without being “forced”. All of this may seem insignificant, but in all actuality these are big wins in our world.

Every cycle of chemotherapy is three weeks long. This week is the first week in this cycle and includes three different drugs that Khloe has not had at all before. Leading up to this week, there has been a lot of anxiety over so much I don’t even know where to begin. You would think at some point we would get used to all the visits, the hospital, and all the things, but we aren’t-none of us are. I don’t sleep well, because I don’t know if Khloe will start running a fever in the middle of the night, I don’t know if she will start getting sick and throwing up in the bed, I don’t know if when she gets up and goes to the bathroom if she will get weak and pass out. We hover over her like the helicopter/lawnmower parents we have NEVER been and honestly, I feel like this hell will never end.

To get back on track here, Khloe has to get chemo four days in a row, which is one of the reasons for admission, but also because her organs among other things have to be monitored to ensure the drugs do not damage her long term and to keep her hydrated properly through this process. I am overwhelmed with the variety of medicines there are for treatment. It’s not just one drug called chemotherapy, instead, there is an abundance of these drugs that are directed at treating cancer-this cancer in particular. Already Khloe has been given five different types of these antineoplastic agents and number six in the lineup is called Cyclophosphamide aka Cytoxan. I do my best to learn and understand what each drug is, what each drug’s main function is, why each is given, how it is used for treatment and while the medical team does an exceptional job explaining to us, I still feel the need to do additional research in order to have a better understanding of what is going on. Even then, I wish I would have paid better attention in Coach Hough’s Biology class in high school. The short version of Cytoxan’s purpose is that it is most effective during the “resting” stage of cells and so when these cancer cells are in this stage Cytoxan can go to work and kill those guys. Number seven is Carboplatin aka Paraplatin also falls into the alkylating agents and works similarly to Cytoxan in attacking during the resting stage of cells, but these two drugs are separated into different classes within their group which I am still trying to understand. And number eight is Etoposide which belongs to another class of chemotherapy drugs, but it interferes with specific enzymes that control the manipulation of the structure of DNA necessary for replication. All of this information is according to chemocare.com which I find myself referring to quite a bit, but that doesn’t mean I can wrap my head around all of this any better than I could before.

In the meantime, we wait.