Charlie had his monthly chemo visit today. When he goes in on a "routine" day, he sees his doctor, or nurse practitioner for a check up. They ask about how he has been feeling, acting and handling the meds. They are always concerned about any bruising, due to low platelets, rashes, or anything that we may have noticed in the past four weeks. Charlie's primary nurse will then come in and access his medi-port. She will take a blood sample and then hook him up to the iv bag for his vincristine. The process is usually very fast, under 20 mins, the port is deaccessed and he gets to go home. Later the nurse calls us with the results of his full blood work up. He is getting better and better about having his port accessed on routine days. When we go in and he doesn't feel well the port access is borderline torture for him and everyone involved.
Today the nurse informed us that his ANC was over 3000. This is not a good thing. While in maintenance his ANC should be between 750-1500. The higher it is means one of two things: 1. the chemo he takes nightly isn't a therapeutic enough dose (aka, he needs more) or 2. He has an infection. We are betting that Charlie has another viral infection at this point. Daniel has a fever, cough and runny nose that started Sunday, so chances are Charlie will have a fever in the next day or two. That means another trip back up for blood counts. The doctor however is concerned about option 1 because his counts for the last few months have been 1600+, 1800+ and now 3000+. So she has instructed us to increase his 6MP pill from one tablet every night to 1.5 tablets every M/W/F and 1 tablet on T/TH. The first week after his chemo visit the pill box is so confusing! Chad sets alarms on his phone to make sure we remember that it is time to drug him up ;)
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