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Me, one week after my hardest MRI, Aug 10, 2006.

Hi everyone, it's Peter. I want to explain my goal for fundraising this year. Last year we collected $10,000 and bought wagons for cancer kids to ride in at AI duPont Hospital For Children. This year I want to collect money so we can buy CinemaVision Goggles. They cost a lot of money, about $48,000 each. I want to buy five pairs of goggles to give to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, AI duPont Hospital for Children/Nemours, and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. That means that we have to raise $250,000, which is a lot. 

 CinemaVision goggles are great technology that can really make the lives of kids fighting against cancer easier. They let kids watch TV and movies in the MRI, and block out the loud noises inside of MRI machines. If you have ever been in an MRI machine then you know they can be scary, so scary that small children have to be sedated to get scanned. This can be really dangerous. I know how dangerous that can be because of what happened to me when I was little 

When I was three I went to get a scan done to make sure the cancer was still gone. That's something I did four times a year. Because I was young, and couldn't hold still, they had to sedate me. I was accidentally overdosed, and went into something called respiratory failure, which means that my lungs stopped working. Thanks to the doctors, I lived. It would have been much easier on everyone (especially mom) if I had been watching Thomas the Tank Engine on a CinemaVision system instead. 

Please help us buy the system so that no kid will have to go through what I did.  Below is my mom's Caringbridge entry from that day.
 
Peter 

Thursday, August 3, 2006 7:48 AM CDT 

Well, We’re back to our things don’t always go as planned theme. The good news is that the PET scan was readable and was clean. Yahoo! Peter was able to gag down the contrast in the crystal light. He really had a hard time and at one point we thought it was coming back up. We brought a die-cast “Fergus” train from the Thomas and Friends collection as the bribe of the day, but it wasn’t good enough. Had the contrast been in Rosenberger’s Iced Tea I think he would have been O.K., but he didn’t like the new tea and adding the contrast made it worse. We called home to Aunt Nanny to have her sweeten the pot. She threw in swimming at Molly’s house with Grant, Ryan and Molly. He wanted more so we added tractor-driving lessons on Bop’s biggest tractor and Uncle Jamie’s lawn mower. He went for it and finished with time to spare. We checked out of Ronald and walked to Sloan. When we arrived we were told that MRI was running ahead of schedule and that Peter would most likely be taken early. Wow, what good fortune, or so we thought; but our luck was about to change.

We happily headed for the elevators and much to our surpise Dr. Garcia was coming out as we were going in. Dr. Garcia was scheduled to be Peter’s anesthesiologist for the day. He had taken care of Peter on many occasions while he was undergoing radiation therapy. The last thing we did on Tuesday night was to pray for Peter’s anesthesiologist. That God would give him wisdom to care for and meet his needs and that he would be open and receptive to our concerns about what we felt were increasing problems recovering from sedation and his newest problem: low oxygen saturation levels while under sedation. Dr. Garcia is a kind and lovely person and I was happy that he would be in charge of Peter’s anesthesia care for the day. We had an opportunity to talk about our concerns, his breathing difficulty during the last scan, and the difficulty waking him the day before from a very small dose that he received to have his dental exam. He was surprised that he was having a problem because his anesthesia care was so uneventful during radiation therapy. Peter was on the schedule to be the second child in the MRI that day. Between the two cases Dr. Garcia reviewed Peter's past anesthesia records and decided to start him at a significantly lower amount then he received during radiation, and to go up from there if he was not under far enough. He administered the sedation and turned to leave the room. Praise God that the dose was lower than normal because Peter immediately stopped breathing. A code was called and the team was able to revive him quickly.  

One of the MRI techs came out to the waiting room to inform us that there was a problem. When I got back to the MRI scanning area Peter was laying on his back on one of the cribs. I could see parts of his red tee shirt and blue shorts peeking out from between the arms of the team of people working on him. The oxygen mask and bag were just being removed and Peter was now awake. Before long he was sitting up on his bed. He had a nose bled from being suctioned and his abdomen was distended from the air that they put into it. There were 4 pads attached to his chest and abdomen and he was acting a little on the silly side. Our favorite nurse Miss Danielle was there and he was playing with her. The MRI scan and the CT scan were cancelled for the day and we took Peter down to the clinic for Dr. Wexler to evaluate him. He was having some nausea issues and Zofran was ordered to relieve it. Dr. Wexler reviewed the previous day's PET scan with us, and explained how and why it was a good scan, even with the full bladder, and that the scan was NED! No evidence of disease.  

We gave Peter the Zofran and after about twenty minutes he asked for a fish sandwich and some cookies. We took him to McDonald’s, but he didn’t eat much. He has a sore mouth from the tubes that were placed during the code. Dennis and I stopped for lunch and then we went back to Sloan. Everything was stable so we left for home. Peter seems to be completely unaffected by all of this; his parents feel differently. He was very tired from his scan trip and fell asleep before we got through the Lincoln tunnel.

We will return next month to have the MRI and CT scans completed. We will have the CT the first day and will try it without anesthesia. It is only about 10 minutes long and we hope that we will be able to keep our little man still long enough to get good pictures without the help of the anesthesia team. The MRI will be the second day and he will placed under general anesthesia so that he can be on a respirator incase he has any breathing problems.

Please praise God that Peter’s PET scan was clean, that Dr. Garcia was cautious about administering his anesthesia and that there are no long term problem from his code. Praise God that our little boy is at home with us and that he is safe and sound. Please pray that he will be safely scanned next month and that both scan results will be NED.

Thank you for your continued love, support and prayers.

CinemaVision Goggles reduce "scanxiety" in tweens and teens, and reduce the need for dangerous sedation in young children.