We're back

When the doctors see something and say "I don't know."

Just when your baby's starting to walk.

After you thought you'd outsmarted the world by driving in to the hospital before the snow hit.

And those three words make your body go numb.

How could you not know what the new cells you found in his bone marrow are? Is an alien going to pop out of his stomach next?

But that's the nature of cancer. Nobody knows why it happens in kids this young. And the type of Acute Myeloid Leukemia that Dominic has is so rare thanks to the 7-12 chromosome abnormality that little is known about it.

All the research we find on it starts with the same ominous sentence: "Poor prognosis." In everything that we've found there's only been one reported survivor, and nothing is known about what happened to them after beating it the first time. We like to think that child is all grown up now.

The main point is that this leukemia is super aggressive, which is saying something given that we're already talking about cancer. And yet Dom was officially in remission after both his first and second rounds of chemotherapy.

The third round is to start this week. It's scheduled to be five days, but the dosage of one of the drugs is 10 times as high as it was previously. But today our doctor informed us he has new information about the 7-12, and wants to intensify things even more. That may involve a bone marrow transplant, which we've been preparing for anyhow.

Believe it or not we've had a great week. Trish and Dominic got to be home for the lion's share of the past two weeks, we got to see lots of friends and life was relaxing. It made going back to Calgary so much easier to handle.

It looks like we needed the time away. We've been up for a breath of air; now it's time to dive deep again.