In God we trust

What a fantastic couple of days we had during the Easter weekend. Saskia was allowed home on the Thursday before Good Friday and the Little Heroes Foundation had organised that we could spend the weekend at Hindmarsh Island. A wonderful family has donated their holiday house for the use of families supported by Little Heroes. It was a wonderful time to be away from it all for a while.
Saskia managed to forget the effects of her operation and was happily sitting along the waterside and catching many a fish.

As earlier mentioned, the operation was a great success. A total of 15 nodes have been removed of which 3 still had active cancer. This was a bit of a surprise as we all thought that there was no more live tumour left, bar her 2nd vertebrae. The MIBG scan however can only detect active neuroblastoma if the size of the tumour is larger than 1 cm. The 3 nodes were smaller than 1 cm, so the scan did not pick these up. However 80% of these tumours was already dead, which proves that the treatment is working.
Our theory is now that Saskia's neuroblastoma is a very slow growing cancer. The last time when she was declared to be in remission (after an MIBG scan in June 2012), there were still some small particles left, which were not detected. These particles started to re-grow again, which made her relapse. With this operation, ALL of the nodes have been removed, so we are relative comfortable that there is no way the cancer can come back here.
All that is left now to treat is her 2nd vertebrae. This will be done with one more chemo session and one lot of radiotherapy.
The chemo will start next week. This will be a very heavy dose and targets her bone marrow. This treatment will be the heaviest she has ever had and will wipe out her immune system completely. There will be virtually no platelets left to stop any bleeding, no white blood cells to fight any infection and no red blood cells to bring vital oxygen to any organ. This means that she will be extremely weak and need to stay in hospital all of the time until she has regained some strength.
On Monday thereafter (12 May), she will receive her own stem cells through a stem cell transplant. It will take a while before this transplant will have its effect, so in all likelihood, Saskia will have to spend around 3 weeks in hospital. As she will have no immune system to protect her, she will have to be in isolation. Only one family member is allowed to stay with her.
We ask you all to carry her and us in your prayers as the coming period will be one of the most trying ones.