Except. . .

I was all set to post an update telling you how smoothly everything has gone. What a happy little ball of energy Austin has been for the past two days: racing up and down the hallways, flinging Play-doh balls around the room, flirting with the nurses. I was all set to tell you how we’d arranged for chemo to be delivered today at noon allowing us to head home by 8:30 and get a totally normal night’s sleep in our own beds.

Except… (oh, that ever-present except!) except that he has a crack in his PICC line. A little break where the plastic tube meets the screwed-on tip that connects to IV lines. It’s not terribly unusual. It happens. And so, of course, it happens to Austin. Because, while he handles the big things (major doses of toxic chemo) like they’re nothing, he always gets downed by the little things.

Soooooo, what to do? Well, that’s what we spent hours this morning trying to figure out, literally hours of back and forth and one plan and another plan. He needs surgery to replace it, a minor procedure for most but remember how they struggled with placing this line the first time? They will run the new one through the current one so hopefully those old issues won’t come into play. The issues that did come into play this morning were the last-minute coordination of the schedules of all the various doctors from all the various departments who need to be present for this thing to be successful and the unfortunately significant fact that Austin ate two grapes (two grapes!) this morning as breakfast, pushing off any potential opening in the surgical schedule for another eight hours.

So finally, we have a plan and I see no reason we can’t stick with it. (Aaaaahhhh, famous last words.) He will have his procedure at 6pm tonight and should be ready to start chemo through his new line by 8 or 9. With six hours of post-hydration plus his various IV medications, we’ll be ready to go first thing tomorrow.

It’s not the end of the world, of course. We’ll make it through this like we make it through everything else. But he hasn’t had anything to eat or drink (save those extremely satisfying two grapes) since 8 o’clock last night, so it’s bound to be a long and grumpy day. He’s napping now and when he awakes, he’ll need a peripheral IV placed in his hand for maintenance fluids and later for anesthesia.

And then tomorrow (oh, how I long for tomorrow), a nice long trip to the playground in this glorious early spring sunshine. And we keep on keepin’ on.