A, B, D - No C {chemo, day 1}

Since Sam wasn't yet on any meds, it was a pretty quiet night.
Shocking, right? Who sleeps well in the hospital? Well, we did. Thank goodness.

Before starting chemo, they needed to do an Echo and EKG, to check Sam's heart function. Chemo can be rough on the heart, so they want to have a baseline reading beforehand. The doctor said he has a "beautiful heart." We already knew that....

I'm such a mean mom. I made him walk there.
(And by "there," I mean from our fifth-floor room to the second floor heart clinic.)
And back.
He only stopped to rest 4 or 5 times.
Maybe I am mean.

Punching in the code to the "secret" elevator

You have to remember how to hold onto your lines and avoid stepping on them. These are things you never wanted to have to remember.

Either way, it got him moving, and we played a rousing game of Hide-and-Find (with stuffed germs) after we returned to our room.

Chemo started in the afternoon and it wiped Sam out.

Poor baby.

It's much the same kind of chemo that Sam got before accompanied by a new drug that is meant as an enhancer of the other drugs. One of these drugs is bad for the eyes, so Sam has regularly scheduled eye drops. The new drug has an interesting issue. It can be inhibited in its effectiveness by too much Vitamin C and antioxidants in the body. This means that Sam has to limit (or even avoid entirely) Vitamin C and antioxidants. No fruit, except apples and bananas. No leafy green vegetables. No foods with high doses of added Vitamin C, like enriched foods -- Carnation Instant Breakfast, for example, which is the main ingredient in my super-secret-recipe world-famous-hospital-grade-high-nutrition hot chocolate. Oy vey. (And no fruit snacks, no fruit rollups, no juice boxes, no orange juice....)

But it's only for the 8 days of chemotherapy. So we can make this work.

A little fever at the end of the night got Sam his first dose of IV antibiotics and we're hoping for another quiet night. What are the odds of two in a row?