Treatment

Okay, here's the deal with the treatment:

This Friday, Ella will begin chemotherapy treatments. She will go through a course of chemotherapy that is 5 days of chemo, then 3 weeks off, 5 days of chemo, then 3 weeks off, etc. This will go for 6 "cycles". During the 3 weeks off, she will come into the hospital for "clinic" visits, 2 days a week. At some point during the chemotherapy, they will remove blood stem cells from her system and freeze them. After the initial chemotherapy phase, there will be a very intensive chemotherapy treatment. So intensive, in fact, that it will kill the bone marrow in her system (thus the stem cells). Following that treatment, she will have a bone marrow transplant, putting the frozen stem cells back into her system to regrow bone marrow and blood cells. After that, we see where everything stands, if everything is good, she will go into a maintenance phase.

During this time, her system will be very susceptible to infections and such. So much so, that if Coleen or I (and obviously anyone else) get sick at all, we won't be able to be around her.

Obviously the treatments have various side effects, some of which are nausea/vomiting, hair loss (Coleen and I (and a few family members) have already decided that if it's okay with Ella, we will be shaving our heads as well), high frequency hearing loss, and infertility. There are some other, less common side effects, but those are the "most likely".