Office Visit 6/15

06/15 1345
ANC 258

We are back to the office for a followup from the hospital stay. Alan's chemistry levels from yesterday afternoon's blood draw showed improvement, so the trend is holding. Doc A will do a chem level on his blood draw today just to be sure, but this is looking good.

What isn't looking good is Alan's blood counts. He's neutropenic of course, which is why we've been given Neupogen shots to give him for the next three days. His red counts are low too, which means we'll be headed to the clinic tomorrow for a transfusion.

His port isn't looking that good either. We had some problems getting blood return today, and it took a lot of flushes to get it working properly. It did start to work, but remembering similar scenarios from last year, we may be looking at a new port. This might work out since Doc A has brought up the possibility of doing a debulking procedure on Alan's tumor. Last year we did not consider this surgery because the tumor was nestled in his right hip surround by too much, but this one is right under his belly button and incision site. There would be easier access to pare down the size of this tumor, concentrating the subsequent chemotherapy treatments on less cancer tissue. We'll take a closer look at the option after his next scan at the end of the month. I'm hoping we can put a new port in during the same surgery if necessary though I don't know if the docs would consider that too much to do during a single procedure. One of the silver linings of needing a new port would be that we could give him a double port again. Having a single port for just doing counts or giving IV fluids was fine, but having a double port makes administering some of the chemotherapy treatments easier.