Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Slow battle back up the hill

These last few days have been fairly rough. Dad's blood counts hit bottom this weekend. That is part of the plan of chemo, but it obviously makes him very prone to infection as well. It also calls several infusions to keep the blood count up. He had had 3 infusions as of yesterday. One thing he was in need of late was platelets. He had a nose bleed that just would not stop over the weekend. Most people are CMV positive and Dad is CMV negative, so it took a little while to track down some platelets.

They have also started started him on a drug (newgen?) to start rebuilding the white blood counts. It is a daily injection that is fairly painful and one of the side effects is bone pain.

In the meantime, he started having some serious pain in his right toe (the opposite leg as the other infection). It looks now like it may be gaut caused by the guild up in uric acid in his system. The added a new regiment of drugs to try and fight that.

He fought a low grade fever all weekend while the docs pumped him full of antibiotics all weekend to to try wane off any infections. He got through most of the weekend ok, but spiked a high fever last night and they running some new blood tests to see if they can determine an unseen infection. They are also changing the regiment of antibiotics up to try and fight this stuff off.

On the good news side, his blood counts have gone up (slightly) over the past two days. We are hoping that maybe this means he is turning a corner. If we can keep the infections at bay here for a few more days and give the white blood counts time to recover, he may get through this first round and get to go home in a couple of weeks.

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