May 10, 2012

Well, we are back at the hospital. It was inevitable with his neutropenic period following such a strong round of chemo. It started when he threw up this morning. I gave him some nausea medicine and just waited to see how the rest of the day went. Then this afternoon around 2ish he threw up again and seemed to be running a temperature. So I was waiting to hear from the hospital before I jumping to conclusions and left work. THEN George calls to tell me he got home from work and there was blood in his throw up from earlier. Alright, now I'm leaving. That's not normal and a sure sign something is going on. As soon as I get home and lay my eyes on Clayton, his nose starts bleeding. But it doesn't stop. It keeps bleeding. Within five minutes of that we were in the car to the hospital. That is definitely not normal. But before we got in the car, we changed his behind and he had blood in his diaper. So for those of you still catching up, his stomach, bladder and nose are all bleeding. Oh, and he was running a 101.5 fever.
His nose continued to bleed steady the whole way to the hospital. In Mobile. So a good 20-30 minutes.
The good news is that I was no longer worried about what was wrong, I was confident it was low platelets. We could fix that. Instead I was worried about how much he was going to bleed before he got a platelet transfusion. After we got here and we did labs, they confirmed his platelet count was 8. To put that in perspective, they usually transfuse when it falls below 20 to 30 depending on the doctor. We also found out that his platelet count from Tuesday morning was 49. So quite the fall from 49 Tuesday morning to 8 Thursday afternoon. That's some serious chemo!
So now we are waiting on his platelet transfusion to arrive. We suspect we will probably be in here three days, as is typical with neutropenia and a fever. However, if his counts have not come up high enough by the third day, then we may have to stay in here longer.
Just to give you an idea, here are some of his numbers:
White blood count is 0.1 normal would be around 15 (I think) and his platelets are 8 and normal would be above 150.
Funny thing is, he once again doesn't seem to have a fever now that we're at the hospital.