And Again, Again
Three guesses where I’m spending the night …
We went in this morning for labs and found that his platelets have risen, slightly. His hemoglobin was a bit lower though, so he needed both blood and platelets. It’s not unusual, you know, to need blood products when you’re receiving chemo — it does destroy blood cells, after all. But this is a bit much by almost anyone’s standards.
Yesterday, they gave Austin platelets from a single donor, instead of the typical “mixed bag” hoping they would stick better. They decided to do the same today but to also increase the amount, which meant concentrating the platelets so that the overall volume doesn’t add stress to his kidney. That took an extra hour or so, which we whittled away watching construction. (I have yet to figure what what on earth they’re building down there and I know it has caused many a traffic headache, but I am eternally grateful to all those bulldozers and front loaders and dump trucks for providing so many hours of entertainment.) By 4pm, he had started his platelet drip, but his nephrologist (kidney doc) was worried about the large volume of blood on top of that so she decided to slow down the blood transfusion from the usual four hours to eight hours and to give the kidney an hour’s rest halfway through. Needless to say, that puts us somewhere in the middle of the night at finishing time. So …
I’m home now with Braedan and Mark’s there with Austin, another round in our rousing game of musical caregivers. I’ll head back down shortly to spend the night and if those counts manage to rise enough, we’ll be sent home “early” tomorrow. Whether that means early morning, early afternoon or early evening, we have yet to find out!
the BESTof luck.
Thinking of you. Susannah is doing an all night run at Brown for cancer research and she has told all of her friends to run for Austin. She loves her Krissy Dietrich still and all her offspring!
Hang in there you guys, we are all behind you!
It will get better – the last rounds of chemotherapy are always the worse. The bone marrow recovers, it just takes time… and more time…. and more time…..