Almost Perfect

So, yesterday was pretty good. As we’ve all had to learn (the hard way), nothing in this game is ever straightforward, there are always always nuances.

First, the good stuff: His kidney and liver are unchanged. The spot on the liver is still there; it’s still hard to see clearly (visible in some planes but not in others) and still impossible to identify but it hasn’t grown and hasn’t spread, which makes it highly unlikely that it’s cancer. Our oncologist actually thinks we can skip a month and if that next one is also unchanged, we can move to ultrasounds every three months which would be awesome.

His bloodwork was also good. A new low for his creatinine which means that kidney is just working away. The normal range for a small child is 0.3 to 0.8. Back in April and May, when he was well on his way to full blown renal failure, his creatinine was as high as 1.75.  His previous low five weeks ago was 1.03. Yesterday’s? 0.87. Yup, that’s right–almost normal, almost perfect.

His hemoglobin continues to lower but at a very slow rate. I’d been thinking he might finally need a blood transfusion, since the last was eleven weeks ago, but it looks like we’ll get at least another month before that. So again, good news.

Now for the chest CT … and the nuances. The official report noted two tiny nodules, less than half a centimeter in size. Tiny little spots that, of course, are impossible to identify. Nodules are harmless, tumors … not so much. The radiologist went back to look again at the last scan from August and determined that yes, the spots were there then too but they’re so small that she didn’t even note them in that report. Not that they’ve grown — they haven’t — but for some reason she was able to see them more clearly on this particular scan.

Most of Austin’s previous chest scans were done under sedation, which causes part of the lungs to collapse slightly, meaning that we can’t compare the two most recent scans to the many done before. So ultimately we don’t know if these little spots have been there for years or if they appeared sometime in the last six months. Dr. Auletta said that no one would call these cancer; no doctor or radiologist studying these slides would consider these spots anything worth worrying about.

So we won’t either. We’ll check again in three months and hope for news that, if not better, at least isn’t worse. We know this process will never ever be without questions and unknowns and small shadowy spots that could drive you crazy … if you let it.

But we won’t.