Lane’s cancer currently has under a 5% chance of coming back. He is in a great place in that respect. Currently his cancer is undetectable, and has been since the end of the first month. Meaning that, with current scientific methods a bone marrow aspiration or blood draw can’t currently find any cancer.
However, we know that statistically if we stopped treatment now his cancer would come back. It is like a jar of honey that has been crystallized. When we first took him to primary children’s hospital his jar was a solid brick. The cancer had clogged his bone marrow so much that no beneficial product was being made(platelets, red blood cells, immune cells). Now we have the honey flowing again, but we are still at a point that if we stopped heating the honey jar with chemo the crystals would grow back and shut everything down quickly.
Right now his Doctor’s are balancing not over cooking his honey( in which case he would need a bone marrow transplant) and under heating the honey and not dissolving the very last of the tiny impossible to see crystals. We have been told this last aggressive push will most likely result in blood transfusions and platelet administration through his port. Once his body recovers from this we will, for the first time during treatment, return to a treatment regimen that he has already completed and handled really well. With so many new things that we have gone through it will be wonderful to return to something familiar. Then after that his chemo will slow to a daily chemo pill and occasional dose of steroids where we will idle until March 6, 2025.
So far since 12-5-22 he has had 10 lumbar punctures, 3 bone marrow aspirations. He has been on 9 different types of chemo. He has had 3 blood transfusions and 3 platelet infusions.