Sun, 05 Feb 2006

We've busted out!
Nate and I busted out. We headed home this afternoon. Hopefully his fever won't rise above the magic threshold that qualifies for a trip to the hospital. His blood labs this morning showed his ANC at 480, and counting in the monocytes, meant he was on his way up for immune strength. And, he hadn't had much of a fever since last night. Dr. Marina sent us packing. Of course, if he breaks the 100.4F temperature range, then we might end up heading back. Let's keep our fingers crossed. Oh, and Dr. Marina said no school until we get lab results Wednesday, so Thursday at the earliest. Christa is bummed, because they've been talking up the 100th day of school for Wednesday, and Nate will probably be really dissapointed.

Christa took Andrew to the doctor today (since he'd had about 4 days of fever), and they said, yep, he's sick. He has a cold or something. We're guessing it's the same RSV that Nate has.

I thought I'd mention a little bit about why Nate had to be hospitalized. Treating Nate's leukemia means killing white blood cells. This causes his immune system to be suppressed. Two weeks ago he had injections of vincristine and also took dexamethasone for a week. This was in addition to the mercaptopurine he takes daily and the methotrexate he takes weekly. Well, the chemo caused his blood counts to dive. His hemoglobin (measure of red blood cells) dropped below 10.0 for the first time in a year and a half (below 8.0 means it's time for a transfusion). His platelets dropped (but were still in a normal range), and his white blood cells dropped significantly, dropping below 1000. He had an ANC number of 400. Anything below 500 signifies neutropenia, a situation where the body can't fight infection on it's own. So, when he started running a fever, and because he was neutropenic, that meant that IV antibiotics had to be started right away as a precaution. If he happened to have a bacterial infection, it could become systemic and cause sepsis in a rapid period of time (hours). This can be fatal. Over the last 3 days, every time Nate's fever ran above 101.3 or so, the phlobotomist would be called to take a fresh blood sample to run a blood culture (to detect bacterial infection in the blood). Even though he was given IV antibiotics the whole time. So, our poor little buddy has been stuck a bunch of times. The good news was that he only needed a single IV (it worked the whole time), and it only took 2 tries to put that one in.

Keep your fingers crossed or say a prayer for us. Hopefully the whole family can get better quickly. Oh, and thanks to Sabine and family, Kristen and family and Cheryl and family for loaning GameBoy games and other activities for the hospital stay.

- Greg
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