Crash

Life as we know it has forever shifted.  Our Fionny is sick.

How can it be that just a couple of days ago I was griping about Fionn's endless supply of energy, his constant barrage of requests for us to play with him?

"Watch me fly my planes, Mama.  Which one is fastest?  Ripslinger or Bulldog?"  My towheaded son running circles around the table in front of me, his little fists gripping his most prized birthday gifts from his little brother.

"Bulldog, I guess, Fionny," I would say halfheartedly as I shoved a tray of cauliflower in the oven, watching Dex crawl away with my other eye.

What would I do for that problem now?  Too much activity.  Too much energy.  Too much, too much.

I am sitting now in a hospital room with a listless Fionny.  He is getting fluid from one IV and a blood transfusion from another.  His beloved planes sit unused in a bag beside my chair.  Conor brought them from home, but he has no interest in them.  All he wants is water, and we can't give him any.  Not until they begin dialysis which should be any minute now.

Leukemia.  It is a strange word.  It has always seemed strange to me.  Curious even.  I think I have always second-guessed my spelling of it.  So many vowels, can that be right?

Now, suddenly it is part of our lives, this strange, hateful word.

How did this happen?  How did we arrive here?  To be honest, we are still trying to wrap our brains around it ourselves.  It still seems like a terrible, terrible nightmare.

I'll tell you what we know right now.  Here is the best rundown I can provide:

Fionny developed a cough last week accompanied by a fever of 102 which prompted us to visit the doctor last Thursday.  She diagnosed him with bronchiolitis which he had as a baby once upon a time.  We were given a breathing treatment in the office and an inhaler to use every 4-6 hours, but he was cleared to go back to school.

He seemed fine.  Normal.  We celebrated his birthday last weekend with a party attended by his best neighborhood buds.  He still had the cough, but otherwise everything was the same.  Fionny was up to his old tricks.  Energetic as all hell.  Ate an enormous piece of birthday cake and opened presents with gusto.

However, this past Tuesday morning his cough seemed worse.  He was wheezing a bit.  We had a "well checkup" scheduled that morning anyway at which the doctor planned to check in on his cough.  At the appointment, upon hearing his wheezing, she changed his visit to a "sick" visit and gave him two breathing treatments.  We were also given an oral steroid to reduce swelling and inflammation of the airway. 

Around 7 pm Tuesday night, Fionn began vomiting.  The vomiting continued all night.  He was unable to keep anything down.  We assumed he was having a reaction to the steroid at first.  But then it continued.  On and on and on.  By 7 am the next morning, he was white as a sheet.  We suspected that he caught a bug at the doctor's office earlier that morning.  We called the doctor at 7 am, and she advised us to come in.

At 9:30 am, we arrived in the doctor's office.  Fionn was still vomiting, so we carted a big bowl with us wherever we went.  The doctor took one look at him and sent us to the ER for fluids.  "He's dehydrated."  His cough, however, was better.  "His chest is clear," she said. 

Once at the ER, Fionny began receiving fluids.  His color started to come back, and we felt sure that it was just a weird bug.  What else would it be?  We joked about our first ER visit.  Shocking that it took this long with this crazy kid of ours.  Who'd have thunk that it would be a stomach bug that would bring us here.  Nutty.  Just nutty.

Then the doctors started asking about the bruises on Fionny's legs.  What, these?  He's a little boy.  He lives hard.  Klutzy like me, I said.

They took some blood.  We learned that his calcium levels were down, and his potassium was up.  The doctor used the word "leukemia" for the first time.  But we were still ruling it out.  Surely we were ruling it out.

And then suddenly we were switching rooms.  We had a big room.  A treatment room.  There was hand sanitizer everywhere.  Masks.  It was the ICU.  Nurses were looking at us with big sad eyes.  Doctors drawing curtains before they talked to us.  Sitting down with serious looks on their faces. 

Leukemia cells had been found, and Fionny would need chemotherapy.  After more blood work, we got the official diagnosis: Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL).  T-cell variety. 

Before chemotherapy can begin, we first have to stabilize his kidneys which were weakened from the abnormal levels of electrolytes in the blood.  Unbeknownst to us (and our pediatrician), the oral steroid she prescribed began to essentially attack the cancerous cells which resulted in this release of abnormal levels of phosphorus and potassium as well as a depletion of calcium.  The vomiting that resulted was his body beginning to react to the mini-war that was beginning in his system. 

There are so many more details, but that is my best layperson's understanding at the moment. If it doesn't seem clear, that's because I'm still really confused about the whole thing.  All I do know is that my boy is sick.  And it is nearly killing me to see him hurting.  It takes my breath away to realize that we are just at the beginning of this fight.

We will continue to update the blog as we know more.  It saddens me to think that this happy blog will become a portal for dishing out information about Fionny's cancer treatment.  But, at the same time, I'm grateful that we have this means of communicating information to our loved ones.  Thanks again for your texts, calls, and emails.  We love you all, and it means the world to us that you are part of our Team Fionny.  Cancer has quite the formidable opponent with our little guy.  This we know.

I'll write again soon.