Priceless

Its morning and there's no sign of any poop yet. He rested well enough. There was a bit of puffiness along the lower portion of his head incision I noticed last evening. The floor resident was uncertain of the cause, so she had the neurosurgeon team notified. I was impressed with their response. One of them came down within an hour. Dr. Jallo, the surgeon who performed the operation came in the morning after his reconnaissance team visited. The consensus is that it is an 'inflammatory response', a result of his resurgent white blood cells, which, by the way, are shooting through the roof now. Our last reading was 1280. They're confirming the reading from this morning now, but the preliminary read was 4000. Gotta love the immune system. This trajectory is apparently due to one of his daily medicines, G-CSF, which stimulates their growth.

We're facing another unexpected issue now. His constipation is keeping us in the hospital beyond when they'd normally send us home. His fever has broken, hopefully for good this cycle. His counts are returning in force, which is a requisite for, you guessed it, second round of chemotherapy and back in the hospital. Hopefully we'll get a day at home, but they also need to harvest some of his stem cells for what is called a autologous stem cell transplant. They will take his stem cells that generate marrow and give them back to him during his high-dose chemotherapy - cycles four through six. I believe this is an outpatient procedure but is anticipated before our second cycle of chemotherapy. We don't have a very big window in which to accomplish it though.

The nurse was doing his repeat blood draw this morning to confirm his counts and he asked for a musical snow globe his grandmother brought in. This is one of those things that before I used to look at and wonder how long before he'd get bored of it and then I could 'retire' it. When I see him play with it now, I see it completely differently. I see his eyes light up and his brain trying to figure out what's going on to make it work and just the smile it brings to his face. I don't really care if that lasts 10 seconds, 10 days or 10 weeks. If it brings a smile now, its priceless.