Mattie was in the PICU(intensive care unit) for about 2 weeks, so Christmas 2009 and New Years was very different than other years. They set a date to take him off of the inhaletor breathing tube because he was responding so well and his "nose hose" which is a tube that goes from an external basin for collection through his nose and down into his lungs and collected residue from the inhaled vomit. The basin was very full when he was removed from the system and after a day or two of being stable they were ready to give him his first dose of chemotherapy..
Chemo is yellow in color whether in liquid or pill form and you need to wear masks, gloves, and dispose of those materials in proper manner. After doing extensive research and drawing my own conclusions, in the world of leukemic cancer the medicine does not descriminate between good or bad cells. It kills indiscriminitly. It is the one time in my life I would vote for descrimination...
So the doctor informs us he will get his first day of chemotherapy and it will blast away 99.9% of the leukemic cells from his body in a single swoop. The before xray above shows his PICC line through his right arm, and you will notice the little bulge on the lower right and that is his empty stomach. The after picture shows a well norished stomach, almost bulging, but you will notice matter above the stomach on the upper right is gone, and a good portion on the left is missing. His glands in his nech subsided and were not swollen anymore and he was officially placed on remission.
This basically means he responded positive to the initial treatment and there is .1% of the leukemic cancer left. One tenth of a percent, wow within 2 days of chemo treatment we have come so far, but I would soon find out we had about 3.5 years of treatment to go if everything went okay. So if you consider the average number of cells in a childs body Mattie's age is about 50 trillion, then the one tenth of a percent that were still cancer is some 500 billion cells...
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