Saturday, November 29, 2008

Minor Set Back


We had our first minor set back. We were scheduled to go into the hospital on Friday, but our daughters blood counts came back too low. We are going to have home health come out and draw her blood again on Sunday and then on Monday morning the children's hospital will call us to let us know whether we will be admitted on Monday or not. It takes a bit of mental preparation to gear up to go in for the chemotherapy treatments, and I have to say that I was ready to go. Oh well, I guess we will have to gear ourselves up again for Monday. Our baby acts just fine, and our Care Manager at the hospital with the oncology department wasn't sure why her ANC count was low. When you go in for chemotherapy all of your blood counts take a dive from healthy levels, then they come back up, but they don't usually bob up and down. When her different counts are low you notice different signs such as easy bruising, weakness, pale skin, etc., but she acts and looks just fine. Her ANC or absolute neutrophil count is what is down. That is the part of your blood that helps to fight off infection. We usually give her neupogen shots daily to help boost her ANC, but this time shortly after starting her on neupogen shots her counts went, up so our Oncology Doctor decided to take her off of the neupogen. It is common after coming off of the neupogen to have your ANC drop a little bit before it bounces back to normal. We had been off of the neupogen for about a week and a half and her blood counts had been rising and then all of the sudden the ANC dropped again. Her Platelets were above the healthy normal range. WEIRD (well at least to me, I guess maybe this happens and it isn't as weird as I think it is, but I wonder what causes this?) I did call up to the oncology clinic to find out why this would happen, but they said we don't know why her blood count has changed. So I guess I will have to talk to the Doctor on Monday while we are inpatient at the hospital. We will be crossing our fingers that we will be admitted on Monday. We are definitely ready to mark off our third treatment and look forward to finishing our fourth so that we can finally do our scans again and see what is happening with her tumor.

4 comments:

Angie said...

I am so sorry that you have had to take one step back. Hopefully on Monday, everything will be ok. You are continually in our prayers. And even more so now. You guys are amazing! Would they just give her more of those shots again to boost the blood count up?

Emily said...

I hope everything is set for tomorrow. Good luck.

Emily

Amy Marble said...

Good Luck! We'll be praying for you all of you. Hopefully you can be admitted tomorrow!

Angela Baird said...

Hopefully things went okay over the weekend and her counts are improving, and she's at the hospital for treatment as we speak...steps backward are always a little hard. You guys are awesome!!