Long Term Maintenance

I am happy to report that as of Sept 14th, 2007, Daniel has entered the long-term maintenance phase of his treatment protocol. This means he gets treatment only once a month, with checkup & bloodwork every 2 weeks in between.
Life has gotten very much back to normal; Daniel is enjoying school and looking forward to Halloween (dressing up as a power ranger).
The docs have been increasing the dosages of his meds since the start of this phase. Basically, they want to give him as much as his body can handle without causing his counts to crash. So every two weeks they have been upping his doses, and his counts have slowly come down, and today's results show that his counts are now too low - he is neutropenic. Which was expected - basically he has hit the maximum level of medication that his body can tolerate. So now we stop all meds for one week, keep him home from school so he doesn't catch any infection, and check his bloodwork again in one week.
I am confident that his counts will be fine by then. We then back up to the last dosage he was able to tolerate, and stick with that.
But there is nothing wrong, all is well, lower counts were fully expected and totally normal in his situation.
Most importantly, he is eating and sleeping well, and is a happy little guy, adjusting to the hectic pace of kindergarten life. All is well in our world.