ANC Continues to Rise, Head getting better, Bacteria back

Posted by Scott in Chemo Round 3, Hospital Stay, Infection, on Wednesday, October 4. 2006 at 18:09

Day 26 of Chemo Round 3

Last night would have been perfect to get sleep if it wouldn't have been for all of the technical difficulties. Let's see...

we had 2 (or more) sets of bad tubing - appears to be a bad batch
we had 1 bad batch of lipids
Asher's PICC line kept getting caught in his elbow (fixed now)

So, every 10 minutes or so they had to reset the pumps. The nurse was pretty frustrated after a while. I think she got it all ironed out about 3am or so. After a while it was almost even funny.

Asher was running a fever for a bunch of the night. It was right after the different antibiotics, so they expect that it is more bacteria being killed. Also, the first blood culture after he got his new line showed that same bacteria in his blood, but the next one hasn't showed anything yet, so hopefully that will be the last positive culture. Nothing is changing with the antibiotics .

His head looks a little less swollen today, especially at the top. Those blister things at the bottom have shrunk a little bit. The Infectious disease Guy, Nurses and Oncology Doctor all looked at it and thought it looked less red and more like it's healing. He's in pretty good pain because of this and every time anything rubs the back of his head he says it hurts.

Most of the fluid from his hands/feet/face is gone, but he's still got a few kg on him - weight 17.7 today. LAsix twice yesterday had him going a lot. he'll get mannitol today to make him go more if needed.

He got some potassium by mouth and by IV today because it was 2.2 after all of the lasix yesterday (lasix takes out potassium).

He also got platelets again late last night.

He's got a small blood clot under the skin by where his Ash split came out. That's normal from what everyone's saying and within a couple of weeks/months it will be absorbed by the body.

His counts are up again today.
WBC=0.4
hemoglobin=9.1
platelet=54,000
anc=344 (neotrophils=68, band neutrophil=18)
cells counted 50

The rest of the immature cells aren't very high at all, so hopefully that doesn't mean we're going to go down tomorrow. I don't think so.

morphine is being left at 1.0mg/hr and 1.0 with pca push.

Recovery is coming slowly, but everything looks to be better each day.
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Howard Fassett - #1 - 2006-10-05 22:36 - (Reply)

I have a stuffed dog I got in Seward Alaska that I want to give to Asher. Given all he is going through I want to wait until the Chemo is finished. Unless the dog could be autoclaved I don't think it would be a good idea to give anything from the outside until Asher's white cell count is high enough. I will make it a point to call Scott on his cell phone some time soon. My prayer are with you all.

Howard


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