Big milestone for Emily

Today was Emily's last IV Chemotherapy treatment ! Even though I've been talking about the end for a while we can't really believe it's here. Emily is in the middle of her last pulse of Prednisone. She's on day 2 of 5. This is her last pulse. Everyone was really excited for Emily, all the staff congratulated her when they found out this was the last IV treatment in the day hospital. We will still see them all, for years, but not as frequently that's for sure.

Emily's exam went really well too. Today we met our new NP, Sadie. She is from UCSF and has experience with Oncology patients. We really like her, she was especially good with Emily and Emily warmed up to her quickly. We will miss Karolina but we are really happy with her replacement too. The exam with Dr. Link was great too. He said Emily was doing really well and it was time to end treatment. He also did a really good job explaining to Tracy and I just how well Emily's odds are at this point. He didn't give a number or percentage but explained that with Lymphoma a large majority of deaths occur towards the beginning of treatment. %10 or so who never make it to remission, and then relapses early on, and complications of therapy. Since Emily has made it through all that, her odds are pretty good. We of course need to do the scans to confirm this all, but you can tell Dr. Link expects clear scans. We all agreed that March 12th will be her last night of chemotherapy all together. So for the next 16 nights, including tonight, she has to take her pills and then we stop. She will continue to take her antibiotic Septra on weekends for the next 6 months.

We also coordinated so that Dr. Link will be able to read all our scans and consult with us before our cruise. So on April 2nd, sometime in the afternoon we can confirm that Emily is cancer free. This meant having to add in her bone marrow asperate earlier than we had planned, but really better for all of us, less time to wait.

That means March will be filled with excitement in the middle when she is done with therapy, and then I'd imagine some stress as we get closer to the meeting about scan results.