It's Day 17 of Induction therapy (or Wednesday evening).  Ryan has been in the hospital since Sunday evening when he came down with a fever and it looks like he will be here a couple more days.  On the positive side, he has completed his steroid treatments so the food cravings are getting less and his stomach is starting to go back to normal...and his is smiling again!

We are still desperately looking for a suitable bone marrow match for Ryan.  We got the test results on his sister and unfortu...
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It's day twelve of induction therapy and we have already been admitted to the hospital once, been in Triage twice and Ryan is having difficulty walking from all the steroids, but he is still in good spirits.  We were just at TCH to see if Ryan needs a platelet transfusion and thankfully he did not.

On January 16, 2012 we had our first bone marrow registry drive at Frontier Collision in Pearland, Texas.  Thank you Mike and Amanda Rackliff for hosting the event and everyone who came out to suppo...
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Well, it's day for of Induction therapy and we are already back in the hospital.  We came in for an eye irritation but will be spending the night since Ryan's heart beat and blood pressure were extremely low.  

In addition, we did hear back from Dr. Pui at St. Jude's Cancer Hospital and he concurred with the Texas Children's treatment plan so we will be staying here for Ryan's bone marrow transplant which Ryan is very happy about.  Ryan was very upset about moving to a different hospital and l...
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It's Tuesday afternoon and Ryan just completed day 1 of Induction therapy at Texas Children's the day before.  We thought we had a plan but I wanted to see what MD Anderson could offer in terms of a bone marrow match.  I had heard that they were doing great things with stem cells and cord blood transplants and wanted to see what they had to say.  After all, its where I'm being treated.

John and I were shocked when we learned that MD Anderson would NOT recommend a bone marrow transplant at this...
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It's about 2:30 in the afternoon and we got the call from Dr. Dreyer.  The Leukemia is definitely back, but luckily it is isolated to the spinal fluid and is not present in the bone marrow.  A small miracle.  Ryan will have go back into Induction therapy to get the Leukemia back into remission and then have a BONE MARROW TRANSPLANT.

Induction therapy will include weekly spinal taps where he will receive Vincristine (VCR) directly to the spinal cord.  Weekly doses of Daunorubicin inserted direc...
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It's Wednesday morning and day 1 of Ryan's next 10-week cycle of maintenance chemotherapy.  Three more cycles to go and he will be done.  As usual Ryan has a routine spinal tap and I have a follow-up ultrasound at MD Anderson on the same day.  It's a normal day for us, we have both been down these roads before.  Ryan is doing great and well as for me, every time I go into MD Anderson there is some type of follow-up and after five years, you just stop thinking about it.  It's December 21, 2011...
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