Saturday, June 04, 2005
Getting there...
Night before last Jacob's fever stopped, and his temp has been normal ever since. The continuous and icky symptoms abated. But around the same time he began to have respiratory distress, his blood oxygen level dropped and he began having a lot pain in his chest. They had to start him on an oxygen mask (actually a whole series of them, trying to find one that worked) and up his pain meds .
Dr. Agarwal said there were three possible causes - infection, fluid, and engraftment and her bet was on door number three.
Today Jacob's counts started coming back strong. From having a white count of <0.1 a few days ago he went to 0.8 today. He's had four chest xrays in the last 2 days none of which showed any infection, and only moderate fluid, so its looking like the problem actually is a side effect of his white cells engrafting: they're congregating in his lungs to repair the damaged tissue.
His CT scan was negative for new tumors or infections in his head. All the blood and other cultures were negative,
so, the big picture is looking vastly better. Poor Jacob is still in a lot of pain, and it's hard to watch his chest heaving and his nostrils flaring, he's still getting platelets daily, and needing diuretics, but it's getting a lot easier to believe that this too shall pass. Tomorrow is day 10.
Meanwhile, our friends, the Diffenders, have had a difficult set back. Our hearts go out to them.
Dr. Agarwal said there were three possible causes - infection, fluid, and engraftment and her bet was on door number three.
Today Jacob's counts started coming back strong. From having a white count of <0.1 a few days ago he went to 0.8 today. He's had four chest xrays in the last 2 days none of which showed any infection, and only moderate fluid, so its looking like the problem actually is a side effect of his white cells engrafting: they're congregating in his lungs to repair the damaged tissue.
His CT scan was negative for new tumors or infections in his head. All the blood and other cultures were negative,
so, the big picture is looking vastly better. Poor Jacob is still in a lot of pain, and it's hard to watch his chest heaving and his nostrils flaring, he's still getting platelets daily, and needing diuretics, but it's getting a lot easier to believe that this too shall pass. Tomorrow is day 10.
Meanwhile, our friends, the Diffenders, have had a difficult set back. Our hearts go out to them.
# posted by Ann @ 7:42 PM 
