Clinic Day

Today was clinic day at Dana Farber's Jimmy Fund Clinic (in addition to radiation at Brigham and Women's).  For now, clinic days happen once per week.  They include blood draws, PICC line dressing change, and meeting with KK's oncologist, Dr. Hanson.

KK wanted to talk to Dr. Hanson about 2 things:

• Getting off steroids - Dr. Hanson gave us permission to wean her off the steroids.  
• Getting rid of the PICC line and replacing it with a port for blood draws and infusions (which will be part of phase 2) - Dr. Hanson is going to talk to radiation about when would be best to do the surgery for the port.  KK would like it done sooner than later so she can go swimming.  She was glad to hear that it is a day surgery and she won't have to stay overnight.

We received good news at clinic today:

• Each week, they use the blood draws to track different levels (i.e. white blood cell counts) to make sure they don't get too low.  Last week, KK's levels were good.  This week, her counts were even better!
• When they removed more of "Charlie" at Children's Hospital during surgery #7, they tested it for certain markers to find out which chemotherapy drug the tumor would respond to best.  The results came back this week and they confirmed that the tumor is sensitive to Temozolomide, the chemo they started giving KK two weeks ago.