James has Wilms' Tumors (Update 7)

Yesterday James came home from the hospital to continue recovering from his surgery. I love the photo above because it shows what good spirits James is in and what a trooper he is. A few weeks ago, the surgeon operated on James's left lung to remove tumors and this past Friday she operated on his right lung to remove tumors there. The pathology of the left tumors showed all the tumors as dead or scar tissue, meaning that the chemotherapy or the radiation killed the tumors. We are hoping to hear that the tumors removed on the right lung will also be dead, which we will find out sometime in the next week. If all goes well and according to plan, April 10 will be our last cancer day. James's counts in his blood continue to improve now that we have completed chemotherapy appointments, and we are looking forward to soon being able to socialize more normally again. After this milestone, we will have appointments every three months to look for cancer since his cancer and his treatment plan increase the risk of getting cancer again. 

James's hair is starting to grow back in. At the hospital James was pulling on his hair and noticing that pulling on his hair hurt. It was cute to see him learning about what it's like to have hair on his head again.

While David was at the hospital with James for the surgery, I stayed home with Neil and Isaac. Isaac has been enjoying playing the piano and being entertained by his brother Neil. We have also started having sunny days again and brought out the water table to play with in the backyard. 

Another exciting win for us is that James has started having an appetite again. Often chemotherapy and radiation can make food taste bad for an extended period of time, which is why being able to eat through a feeding tube can be so helpful. We found the feeding tube especially helpful for administering medications since taste isn't often a consideration made when they are being developed. Often during this experience James would see food, think it looked tasty, try it, and immediately spit it out because it tasted bad. We joked that he was like the food critic in Ratatouille who shared, "If I don't love it, I don't swallow." (But obviously it's not that James is a picky eater but it's the impact of the chemo and radiation on his taste buds.) 

In the photo above here he is eating a banana with our new au pair from China. 

Our family is looking forward to soon entering the next stage of cancer treatment and having more normalcy in our lives again. 

Love you all,

-Marissa and David

Update: The day after I published this post originally we got a call from James’s doctor that the tumor results showed the tumors were dead and James is cancer free! Yay, we did it!!