In the Middle

Happy New Year!  This is of course the time of year where magazines, newspapers, memes and Facebook explode with ways to become your best self.  Everyone everywhere takes the turning of the calendar as an opportunity to plan a fresh start - eat better, exercise more, read the Bible, be kinder, get organized and on and on.  People close the old and usher in the new.  To be honest, I've never really been one for new year resolutions because they rarely stick (sorry those of your who are still going strong on day 4), and January 1st is no more magical then any other day of the year.  This year especially, all these resolutions feel off.

We are in the middle right now.  The old that we want to close is not yet ready, nor is the new ready to be ushered in.  We cannot yet close the chapter on Jonah's treatment, as although we've got about 23 weeks behind us, we've got about 20 weeks ahead of us.  We cannot yet usher in the new chapter, as we have little idea what the next 20 weeks will bring.  There are no resolutions in our family this year, which is not uncommon as I said I don't often make resolutions, but this time it's for a different reason.  We are heads down, one foot in front of the next, trudging through - unable to resolve to more than that.

What are we trudging through right now you may wonder.  Jonah is in the middle of cycle 5 right now.  Getting to cycle 5 took a little extra time this round as Jonah's counts were slower to recover, (thanks in large part to one of the chemo meds - cisplatin) so we were a full 2 weeks delayed.  At the beginning of every round we do an audiology test, as cisplatin is also known to cause hearing loss, and this round revealed the loss we were dreading.  He can still hear out of both ears, but all the pitches are impaired to some degree in the right ear and a few high pitches are impaired in the left.  Because of this, we will be reducing his cisplatin dose this round.  As his counts were lower going into this round, he's already feeling it more and is resting a lot.

After cycle 5, we anticipate starting cycle 6, the big guns with the stem cell transplant, on February 1st.  There is a busy box campaign going on for those of you who haven't heard, to help keep Jonah busy during his 30 days of isolation.  Conversations about radiation have started too.  Everyone wants to get cycle 6 underway before we move on to thoughts of radiation, but a few conversations have started.  He'll likely get a 4 week break after discharge from cycle 6 and then start 6 weeks of radiation, 5 days a week.  Then we wait, we watch - we see if treatment brought Jonah to a place of remission, we see if the disease will reoccur (which it loves to do), we see what the short and long term effects of treatment will be.  Maybe then we can start to make some resolutions, but until then we are in the middle.