Explanation of What's Happening

So, why is she in the hospital again?

Well, there are two facets of the effects of her therapy. First, it's important to understand that the treatment runs on a three week cycle (which we conveniently break down to Week 1, Week 2, and Week 3).

Week 1 begins when she receives her chemo. This is the first facet of the therapy. Immediately, she becomes super tired. The reasoning is that chemo = poison. The idea of chemo is to poison the patient as much as possible without killing the patient. So, she has essentially been poisoned and the body reacts. Week 1 is thus characterised by extreme tiredness. For example, the first two days she is usually unconscious the whole time.

Week 2 begins the other facet. As she recovers from the effect of the shock of being poisoned, now comes the effect. Chemo essentially attacks and kills ANY fast growing cells in the body. It's designed to - that's what cancer cells are. Sadly, in the same category are various other important cells such as hair, fetus cells (should she have started with a pregnancy or become pregnant), and... white blood cells.

What are white blood cells? White blood cells are the body's army (please bear with me, but a military metaphor really works here) to defend against invading cells such as disease and viruses. Normally, you never know that the WBC are doing their job... you come across Mean Nasty Virus, it tries to get you, and a swarm of WBC defeat it and kill it, and you have nary a sniffle (Yay! Go White Blood Cells!).

But in Week 2, the chemo has been decimating the WBC. The body tries to make more, but... the chemo affects the "recruiting" so to speak. It's hard for the body to make more. Thus the WBC count (number of WBC on duty) begins to drop. A count of 3500 is a great count to have. You can walk confidently through a crowd of sicklies with that. The lower the number, the more stretched thin the WBC army becomes and the easier it is for the diseases to infiltrate the body.

We monitor her WBC every two days. When it approaches the 2000 level, we begin to get concerned. We inject her with shots (expensive suckers, too) that are essentially "emergency recruiters". It's goal is to immediately boost the WBC count by convincing the body to make more cells.

Sometimes it works.

Sometimes, the count continues to drop. For example, Wednesday her count was at 1700. She got a shot. Within 24 hours, she began to get fevers, and other reactions to sickness (which I closely monitor), and when the fever reached dangerous levels, we took her in. Within 24 hours, her count had dropped to 1100. That's essentially a 33% drop (think of 1 out of 3 WBC deserting the fight in one day).

1100 is dangerous. Below 1000, you're placed in isolation because at that point, your WBC army is too thin to be effective. You can't even defent against the everyday germs you carry on your body. (At her lowest in her first hospital visit, she dropped to 600.)

So, the goal that we're doing now is giving her antibiotics. For starters, they gave her a form of Cipro last night. Cipro is essentially a nuclear weapon of antibiotics - super powerful. Were we to have an anthrax attack, we'd all be taking Cipro. It's effective, but like the chemo, it cuts a wide swath. But, with 1100, you can't take chances.

Next, we have to get that count up. So, we're doing everything we can to help her body's WBC recruiters be effective. You can picture throughout the liver, kidneys, and all along the blood vessels tiny posters saying "Ellicia's Body Wants YOU!".

Now, to follow-through, Week 3. Week 3 is the upward swing. The energy begins to return and the WBC are normally returning to duty. By the end of Week 3, she is behaving almost normally - full of vigor, etc. And then... she gets her next treatment, and we start Week 1.