Allergic Reaction

Today we went to the hospital for week 17 of our treatment. Beckett was seen by the nurse practitioner and she was so happy with how his breathing and airway was looking. We were also happy to report that we finally got the all clear from the public health nurse that Beckett's Giardia is all gone.

Anyway, the treatment was going as normal. I was laying down with Beckett to get him to hopefully take a nap. I noticed that it seemed that he was breathing kind of hard and coughing a bit so I went to get the nurse. It turns out it was a good thing I did as Beckett was having an allergic reaction to the carboplatin which is fairly common at this stage. The type of reaction is called anaphylactic (kind of like when people are allergic to bee stings, I think).

The nurses immediately ran in and took the carboplatin off his IV and administered benadryl and hydrocortisone by his IV (port). They also paged the Nurse Practitioner who came right away and ordered extra fluids and called the respiratory specialist. They gave Beckett blow by oxygen, which is when they just put the mask near him, but don't make him wear it, which is good because he was not happy with all the people fussing around him. They also gave him a breathing treatment which was pretty uncooperative with. They got his O2 saturation to 97% which is where they wanted it and then they decided to stop the breathing treatment because he sounded clearer and because he was so mad that his heart rate was going up pretty high.

Finally everyone left and I cuddled him for about 2 minutes and he fell fast asleep from the Bendryl. Totally ZONKED! So zonked that he didn't even wiggled when they took his blood pressure.

Trish and Dr. Fisher came in to talk to me. They said that they would not be continuing Carboplatin as this was considered a severe reaction. So we are having a meeting next week to discuss options for treatment ("plan B" as the Dr. put it). Simply put, the options are: another IV medicine, an oral medication, or watch and wait with frequent scans. I am guessing they are going to recommend the other IV medicine as Beckett is probably too young to reliably take a pill and he responds so poorly to general anesthesia, but we will see.

Now we are home and he is just fine. He just watched Diego: Baby Jaguar on Nick On Demand for the 800th time and is getting ready for bed like nothing happened.