Day 1

Pre-Operation

Archer woke up this morning at 7am with a smiling face! He was even excited to see the garbage waiting to be taken out at the front door as he exclaimed "garbage!" in an overly joyous tone. We made it to the hospital close to on time, despite terrible traffic. With a smile on his face the whole time, Archer played with toys, watched The Muppets and made friends with a little boy named Max.

Port Placement

Archer was taken from us around 10 am to get the "Power Port" installed in his chest. The procedure went very well and while Archer had a little bit of a hard time waking up fully from the anesthesia, there were no complications. He is a trooper and the nurses were all amazed at how calm he was after coming out of anesthesia. They said that most kids are quite cross but Archer didn't even whimper. He gazed very intently into the depths of his own thoughts. One can only imagine what went on in there.

Admittance

Immediately after he awoke, we were admitted to a room and the surgical oncologists (Dr. Verma and Dr. Ast) came in to educate us about what to expect from chemotherapy. They informed us that his cancer was at stage IV and that they were much more worried about Archer than a lot of other children with hepatoblastoma because there are several nodules in his lungs (12 to 15 or more).  They informed us that there are two main protocols to treat hepatoblastoma, one used primarily in the US and the other used primarily in Europe. There are benefits and downsides to both, but they are choosing to follow the European protocol, which is much more aggressive, because of all of the affected areas in his lungs. This means that the treatment plan is different than what we thought but it also means that the risk of the cancer returning is less. However, the risk of permanent hearing loss is much higher at around 50%. 

As you can imagine, this was heartbreaking news. That high of a risk for permanent hearing loss is one thing but the fact that the cancer has spread much more than we understood initially was truly crushing!

Treatment

Disregard pretty much everything that I said about treatment in the prior blog post. That was the process for the other protocol. The treatment at this point will consist of several chemo treatments in a few different blocks. They will be using 3 different types of chemo medication and they are currently administering his first dose. Each dose will be administered over the course of a 24 hour period, then they will administer fluids over the next 24 hours to make sure that his body is flushing it all out. He will have three treatments over three weeks, then one week off, three more on, one more off, two on and then two off. At that time, they will see if the tumor is recessed enough to remove it. If not, they will do 6 more weeks with one on, two off, one on and two more off. After removal of the tumor, they will continue chemo for 9 weeks.

After finding all of this out, Archer finally got some food. All he had been asking for all day was pizza and pizza is exactly what he got! Pepperoni pizza. He insisted that Aubrey hold the pizza but he pecked at it like a little bird and he chowed down three slices before it even seemed like he took a breath! After he devoured the first three slices, he decided that he could maybe hold it and eat it at the same time. There is a video of him devouring his pizza at the end of this post. 

Emotions

As you can probably imagine, we have been on the Goliath of roller coasters today when it comes to emotions. I have always had immense respect for people that have had to go through chemotherapy and radiation treatments but you can never understand what that entails without living it first hand. I'm not one to wear emotions on my sleeve so this next portion of the post is very out of character. In fact, I would say I'm an expert at keeping my cool no matter what I'm feeling. I am, however, right now, feeling helpless, scared and shamelessly overwhelmed for what Archer is about to endure over the next few months. It is so hard to think of your baby boy sitting in a hospital, surrounded by people he doesn't know, being loaded up with medications that make him feel everything from nauseated to completely unaware, and knowing that you still need to go on with your routine as if that wasn't the case. I honestly don't know how people do it.