Beautiful things - jaylor story (peace book 4)

the results and picking a fight

** Wednesday february 20th, 2036** 

-taylors Pov-  

The oncologist, her resident and the bedside nurse comes in, and seeing as Kenzie is sleeping again, we get the news us selves first. "We got the result from the two bone marrow tests, and it shows that the cancer has spread to the bone marrow. So that means she has the four sites where there are enlarged lymph nodes, a big growth on her liver as well as the fact that it has spread to the bone marrow. Because of all of the testing we have been doing we are confident that this is stage 4B mixed cellularity Hodkin's lymphoma. The B stands for the fact that she has several of b-symptoms as well as the usual symptoms" she says.  

She doesn't say much more before Kenzie stirs and sits up in bed groaning and then she gets a familiar look on her face, and I rush to her side with a bag for her to throw up in. This happened a lot yesterday and several times last night too. After she throws up, she starts crying and a nurse comes to wipe her mouth and remove the bag.  

"Baby girl it's okay. We are here" I tell her and cuddle her.  

The doctor comes over and smile at her "hi Kenzie, I was just telling your parents about what we found out from the testing. I've already told you what you have, but I was just telling your parents which stage you fall into. Basically, there are loads of different thing that can come with this type of cancer, so what we do is that we have a system where we say that stage one is this, stage two has this and so forth. What you have is stage four B. which is just our way of explaining that your cancer has moved out of the lymphatic system and also involves places like your liver and bone marrow. That's the things we pulled out from your hip yesterday and took to our lab to check it out. It showed that there was cancer there too" 

I really like how she speaks to Kenzie because she explains it so well and actually talk to her too and not just the parents. "Am I going to die" she asks, and I bite my lip.  

"I am not allowed to promise an outcome sadly. But what I can tell you is that we have made a plan on how to get you better. Even though its stage four doesn't mean that its terminal. What it means is that it's more severe and that it needs more intensive treatment, so that's what we are going to do. We are going to give you something called second-line treatment, more specifically we want to give you a combination of different chemo drugs that we are going to give you for a week, then you get a week home, and that happens over and over again for at least 8 weeks in the hospital in total"  

She goes on to explain to us that chemo can give you loads of different side effects, and it makes me anxious. "common side effects are fatigue, pain, mouth- gum- and throat sores, vomiting, constipation and diarrhea, different types of skin irritations like itching and rashes, changes in weight, hair loss, kidney and bladder problems, anemia which means that you have low blood counts or iron, blood clotting problems which means that you have low platelets that helps your blood to clot, something called neutropenia which means that you have low white blood cells in your blood, and a wide range of infections because your immune system is weakened. But there are plenty more though, these are just what we see the most"  

All of these can be more or less severe and its scary to hear what can go wrong for her, there are lots of things apparently. There are also some of them that is more common than others like gastro problems, fatigue and hair loss.  

"Today we want to take her down to the operating room to put in a port under her skin on her chest to administer the medication through there, so she doesn't need IVs. It means that we put a thin needle through her skin and into the port to administer whatever she needs. And then when we take the needle out, she can do things like shower without worrying about the central line, but we advise to use a bandage over it just in case." then she goes on and explain the things we need to keep in mind when she has the port and is at home. There are symptoms of infection like increased pain, swelling, warmth or redness. There can be red streaks leading from the site. There can be pus or blood draining for the site or a fever or chills. She will also need to carry a medical alert card for it if she comes in a situation where she needs it.