More hurdles

April 17^th – Last Thursday (4/12) Cole started his pre-treatment chemo during the day and then at 7pm something went wrong. Cole started having problems forming his words and it was difficult to understand him. This lasted for a little over an hour. An MRI with contract was ordered and by 10pm we knew Cole had suffered a sub-dermal bleed next to his brain. They believe that the bleed was putting pressure on his brain and causing the speech issues. The doctors immediately stopped his blood thinners and pre-treatment chemo’s. The next day the speech issue returned and stayed. Subsequent images were taken and thankfully the bleed had not increased. We do not know for certain the cause of the bleed, but they suspect the blood thinner along with prior conditioning. This made for a couple of very anxious and nerve racking days, as we were not sure if this would require very risky surgery. Thankfully it looks as if we have avoided surgery for now.

The big picture for his Leukemia is now cloudy, as he cannot get his CAR-T immunotherapy cells until the bleed heals and we do not yet know how long this will take. So in the meantime he will receive chemotherapy to keep his Leukem 

ia at bay until such a time that we can again attempt to receive his CAR-T cells. We are told that the CAR-T cells are good for about 9 months.

In addition we need to deal with his blood clot that formed while we were still in WPB and he cannot be on blood thinners. So they have decided to remove his port, as the clot is where the port connects to his vein. Hopefully this will resolve the clot issue. He is scheduled to have it removed on Thursday. If all goes well, we will receive future treatments on an outpatient basis until the bleed resolves.

Will continue to keep you all updated as we move forward. Please note, our new mailing address for sending cards will be:

The Boston House
c/o: Cole Malone
229 Kent St
Brookline, MA 02446

#Minions, #ColeStrong

Chris, Cole and Denise

Cole in his room

Minion Cole