Three kids, two boys and a girl, in pajamas on Christmas Eve.

Hello friends!

I hope that you all had a wonderful holiday season and that your new year is off to a great start. The days and weeks (months?) have admittedly gotten away from me, and I realized it had been quite some time since I provided an update on how things are going here and how Dominic’s treatments have been. (If you are on Instagram, follow me there @thebrowneyedbaker, as I tend to share quick updates on stories much more often!)

The last time I updated, he was finishing up a cycle of treatment at the beginning of November. After that cycle, he required many platelet transfusions, and it took his white counts a long time to rebound, so long in fact that his next cycle of treatment in December had to be pushed back a week. Both were the result of radiation to his spine, which can cause damage to the bone marrow. By the time treatment rolled around in mid-December, both counts had returned to normal.

In between treatments, we traveled back to New York for a scan workup to see how the spots were responding to treatment. Initially at relapse, there were two small spots on his spine and a small one on his jaw, as well as a small amount of disease found in his bone marrow. The results of the scans the first week of December showed that one of the spots on his spine had completely resolved, and the other two spots were reduced by about 40% and less “active”, and his bone marrow biopsy came back clear of disease. We were so grateful to get positive news and know that the treatments have been effective. The game plan at that point was to do two more cycles of immunotherapy with low-dose chemo and then scan again.

His treatment the week before Christmas was a little more “eventful” than we’d like – he had some high fevers with hallucinations, a bit of facial swelling, and an injection that he receives for five days after completion of immunotherapy caused an anaphylactic reaction and needed to be discontinued. Needless to say, we were happy to get home after that cycle and have it behind us.

We spent Christmas and the holiday break at home with just the five of us; with soooo many illnesses circulating in our area (especially the flu) and Dominic’s counts still very low, we did not want to risk another hospital admission if we could avoid it. We have all stayed healthy, and we enjoyed a lot of relaxing days playing games, dominoes, and watching movies. It was so nice to be home together and not do any running around!

Dominic’s hair has grown a ton in the last couple of weeks! He’s starting to look like he has a short buzz cut, lots of dark hair coming back :)

Next steps are a planned admission next week for a cycle of treatment (fingers are crossed that his counts meet the threshold and treatment does not need to be delayed again), and then, at some point following that, there should be another set of scans to see where we stand, but they are not scheduled yet.

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Thank you all for your continued prayers, well wishes, emails, cards, and check-ins, we appreciate it all so very much and are so grateful for your care and support of our family ❤️ I am hoping to get in a better routine here at the start of the year and bring more recipes to your inbox more routinely!