Family goes home to California

Chemo - Day 4

Day 4 Chemo is the same as Day 2. She only had a push this morning at 10:35pm. Donna, Tom, Danny, Jody and Jason all left today to fly home. Donna and Danny plan to fly back when Jordan starts her next session of Chemo. Donna was heartbroken when she left. She so badly wishes she could be here the whole time.

Jordan still has a knot in her back where they did the bone marrow test. It is like a bruise under the skin and it bothers her a little bit.

Jordan walked a couple of laps around the floor to stretch her legs. We also took a wheelchair ride down to the cafeteria because she was feeling hungry. Unfortunately, the ride to the cafeteria upset her stomach and she wasn’t feeling well for about an hour or so afterwards.

Dr. O told her the other day that she has to use an electric razor to shave her legs and armpits because she cannot risk a cut while shaving because of the possibility of infection. Once her white blood cells go down, she won’t be able to fight off infections, colds or other illness. Running a fever will become very dangerous for her and needs to be taken seriously.

We met Dr. Rossbach today when he was making rounds. I briefly met him yesterday, but Jordan hadn’t seen him yet.

Dr. R told us a couple of interesting facts about Jordan’s Leukemia. First of all, she has a very rare sub type called M7. Normally this sub type is only seen in patients who have Down Syndrome. He teased Jordan a little bit and said she obviously didn’t read the manual before she came down with this, because she isn’t supposed to have M7.

Another interesting thing he told us had to do with her receiving bone marrow from Jason. If Jason is an exact match and we do the bone marrow transplant, her blood will from that point forward always indicate her as a male. It doesn’t change her characteristics at all, but her blood will be coming from the male bone marrow, which produces male blood cells, red and white. He told her that if she ever tried to enter the Olympics that they wouldn’t let her classify herself as a girl, because the blood tests would say she is a boy. I’m guessing that she would have to provide proof of such to be able to qualify. (She doesn’t have any Olympic ambitions, so we don’t expect this to be a problem.) This is true for any person who receives bone marrow from the opposite sex.

Dr. Tebbi and Dr. Wynn also came to see her today and told us they got back the results of the genetic testing and it showed a genetic factor to the Leukemia. I don’t totally understand what they were explaining and I’ll wait for Dr. O to come in next week and tell us again. They mentioned that this genetic result explains something to them, it seemed an important piece of the puzzle and that they will most likely administer an additional medicine that deals with this specific factor.