January 25, 2022

 We have reached the end of frontline treatment! We made it! Aurelia’s blood tests and scans are all good, so we will be allowed to return home to Girona on Friday. Aurelia so so excited to go home after two months away.


She handled the last two weeks of treatment really well and has been feeling pretty good. Her doctors think she will be able to return to school and sports sometime in March.

From here we move to the “long term maintenance” phase of treatment. Aurelia will take chemo pills each day at home and go in to the hospital for treatment every 3-4 weeks. This will continue until summer 2023 (more or less). We still have a long way to go, but getting through frontline was a huge feat and we are so proud of her determination and strength.

We will continue to take things day by day. Some kids do really well in maintenance and don’t experience any challenges while others struggle and are in the hospital a lot, so we don’t know what to expect. We have found that focusing on her diet and exercise seem to help a lot, so we will continue those things and keep side effects to a minimum.

Aurelia has lost all of her hair so she wears head coverings outside the house as she doesn’t like her cute bald head. 

Eston has been staying with good friends in Girona. He was a close contact of another COVID case, so we are grateful to our friends for taking such good care of him this week. Eston is thrilled because they live across the street from school, so he can sleep in and walk to school. We will all be together at home in a few days! 

As always, we are so grateful for everyone and all of their support. It means the world to all of us and we feel surrounded with love. 






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

July 13, 2021

Image
I arrived at the hospital a few hours ago (aurelia is having her snack and watching master chef) and we have great news from the oncology team. When Aurelia was first diagnosed her sample cells were 92% cancer and now that number is 1%. There is a long road of treatment ahead (approximately two years), but these numbers give everyone a huge boost and so much hope. Aurelia is not the least bit surprised as “she knew she was killing the cancer.” So there you have it. Aurelia is working really hard with the physio to start walking again. She does several sessions a day and we are trying to get her inflamed nerves back to where they need to be so she can start walking. Now that her blood is healing itself, we hope her bones and nerves will follow. A few people have asked me about sending cards or postcards. Aurelia loves getting postcards! The best place to send them is to Federal, our restaurant in Girona.  Aurelia Sutherland Federal Café Girona C/Forca, 9 Girona 17004 Spain 
Read more

November 4, 2022

Image
 Aurelia continues to fight and win! This long phase is called maintenance and her medical team tries to keep her counts within a certain range and the chemotherapy is adjusted according to her blood counts. Too low is too much chemotherapy and too high is not enough, so they look for a certain range in every visit. The last month Aurelia’s bloods have been incredibly good…but this also means they give her more chemotherapy to bring the counts back into the range. I know it sounds odd, but this is the protocol that has proved successful for decades so we continue our fight. I know it’s hard for Aurelia to hear that we have to increase chemotherapy because her counts are so good, but I present it in a way so she knows she is stronger than the disease and a step ahead of it. Sometimes it works and other times she rolls her eyes at me. 😊 We continue to notice gains with her stability and strength. She gets frustrated, but she keeps going with her physiotherapy and running and riding....
Read more

August 19, 2022

Image
 Today is a big day: Aurelia’s final lumbar puncture! For the past year Aurelia has had monthly intrathecal chemotherapy. This is when she is out under general anesthesia and chemotherapy is injected into the fluid around her spinal column. As you can imagine, it’s not her favorite treatment, so she is thrilled that today is the last spinal! We were able to go on our road trip to France, which was amazing since we haven’t traveled much between COVID and cancer. It was a lot of energy, but Aurelia did her best. We ended our trip a day early as she wasn’t feeling that well and we didn’t want to push things too much. It was easier to leave the race and just drive home so she could rest, so that’s what we did. Aurelia was thrilled to wear all of the special jerseys given to her the past year. She had a different jersey for each day we were there. ❤️ We have been trying to have as normal of a summer as possible between hospital appointments and chemotherapy. Beach days, bike rides, shor...
Read more