Remission

As my beautiful daughter continues to test my response time to her needs, she developed a temperature and redness around the exit site of her Central line today, 10 mins after my car was sent in to have a couple of things done. Even though the garage promised to have the car back as quickly as they could the hospital preferred that I bring her in sooner rather than later. The consultant greeted her with "hello trouble", two and a half hours later we were sent on our way with some oral antibiotics. Paige has been responding very well to her Chemo and hasn't needed a blood transfusion since inception, additionally based on her recent blood tests, her body is making it's own white blood cells and neutrophils - yay!!
Poor thing she's loosing her hair rapidly, but her laughter and giggles have returned so that's as good a trade off an any in my books :-)
On to the good news now, Paige had her 5th Lumbar Puncture and 2nd Bone Marrow test done yesterday, her consultant called late this afternoon to share with me that she could not see any leukemic cells in the marrow and Paige had now achieved remission during her Induction. Her spinal fluid was also clear. She also advised that her blood looked quite good and she was pleased that Paige was making white blood cells and neutrophils. The goal of induction is to achieve remission and Paige has been extremely fortunate that she has been well during the entire time - again thank you to everyone who has said a prayer for our sweet Paige, it's working so please continue to pray for her :-). The proof of the pudding will be the results of her Minimal Residual Disease (MRD) which will take 4 - 6 weeks, this will aim to measure her response to treatment and whether it needs to be more intensive. The presence of her CNS Leukemia continues to be a huge worry and gives her a poorer prognosis.
The next phase of her treatment is Consolidation and starts next week Tuesday with a Lumbar Puncture, and two other types of chemotherapy. Chemo continues for three days after that, so whereas she had chemo once per week, she will now have chemo 4 times a week. We have been warned that she has had really smooth sailing so far and she will become ill with all the drugs in this phase :-(