Changing of The Guard

I'm back online and Amy has relieved me at the hospital. Interestingly enough, I am not online in a traditional setting but from my laptop while sitting in front of a campfire beside a tent in my brother's back yard with my brother Ryan, my son Josh, and his cousins, Kyler and Eric. I was not prepared for this makeshift camping trip, but Josh has a bit of a cold so Amy dropped him off at my brother's house before coming to the hospital. By the time I got there, they had already cooked up this little plan and were busy moving sleeping bags into the tent. So I just traded the hospital bed for the hard ground. Somehow, I don't feel like I'm getting the better end of this deal. I'm going to miss my Thermarest, my sleeping bag, my warm clothes and every other camping item that I would have brought had I been forewarned.

But enough about me - back to Katie. When I left the hospital this evening, Katie had a temperature of 38.4 Celsius. She was in good spirits and has been in good spirits ever since she vomited this afternoon. I'm not sure how much Amy has passed along in my absence (I didn't read the earlier blog postings before starting this one) so I will give a brief synopsis. She has had a fever, off and on, for the past couple of days and has stopped eating anything meaningful. To handle the eating problem, A new IV has been ordered called a TPN which should provide all of the nutrition she needs even if she doesn't eat. The fevers are a bigger problem. The doctors are not fond of this newest rash of fevers so that are starting Katie on a new round of antibiotics, afraid that they may be missing something in the cultures. In addition, Katie developed a small cough today which is really the first localized symptom that we have seen in days. Given the cough, no one wanted to take a chance that something might be wrong with her lungs, so a CT scan was ordered and Katie underwent her first CT scan with flying colors. We had a couple of hours to prepare for the scan so I spent some time telling her what to expect and explaining how the process would work. I even used a small toy dog and some parts from the hospital bed to simulate someone sliding into a CT scanner. Katie admitted that she was scared, and her eyes were as big as saucers going in, but she held still and the technicians were able to get a good picture of her lungs very quickly. It helped the the Child Life people hooked us up with a portable DVD player and a Dora video for Katie to watch while she was getting scanned. I was able to don a lead shielded apron and stand next to Katie, holding the DVD player so that she could look at the screen and watch the video upside down while being scanned.

After the CTscan, Katie happily went back to her room and took a desperately needed nap. Unfortunately, she vomited about 10 minutes into her nap and had to start all over. After I got her all cleaned up, she slept peacefully for the rest of the afternoon. She even got some of her appetite back and ate a little tortellini for dinner. She was very happy to see her mother, and spent lots of time giving her hugs and kisses and telling her she loved her. Josh was just as happy to see me, but Josh, I am unhappy to report, has a cold. He won't be allowed near his sister until his cold clears up, so they won't see each other at all this weekend. Katie asked for Josh too, but she accepted it well when we told her why he wouldn't be allowed to visit.

At this point, we are going to wait and see how Katie handles the new anti-biotic and anti-fungal medications. If things are pretty much the same next week, she will probably have her bone marrow pulled and tested on Wednesday. The bone marrow test will let the doctors know whether her marrow is producing healthy cells like it should be or whether it is producing leukemia cells again which might explain why her cell counts are not coming back up like they are supposed to. Hopefully, she recovers before that time and the tests only show healthy, productive cells that were just repressed for a while by a combination of chemotherapy and a viral infection.

With these happy thoughts in mind, I will now curl up next to my son and go to sleep in this tent with the smell of camp fire smoke in the air. This is our first camping trip of the year, even if it is in the back yard, and I will make the best of it.