Friday 1st April 2011

Just when I thought things would settle into normality, Luke hit another hurdle.
He'd been on his maintenance chemo for a week. He had been having Mercaptopurine daily and then had his first Methotrexate on Sunday. He was put on weekly bloods at the beginning of the cycle as everything was fine and therefore had a blood test on Tuesday 29th March. In the afternoon one of his doctors called to say that his liver function test level was extremely high. A normal LFT level is 55, Luke's was over 1000. It appears that probably a combination of both chemo tablets caused the problem but also that the dosage of these might be too large.
They put chemo on hold straight away and have been taking daily blood levels and the LFT levels have been going down daily by 150 - 200. His latest level was just over 400. He is now going onto blood tests every second day and once his levels reach a normal level (100 is around Luke's normal whilst on chemo) they will reassess the chemo dosages.

Luke actually has appeared to be going really well and we wouldn't have picked up anything was wrong unless the blood test showed a problem. He's been busy working on uni assignments to try and catch up. Hopefully he will in the next week or so.
I'll let you know how things progress as anything new happens.