Day +36

 Day +36 

April 16

WBC: 2.2 (down)

ANC: 890 (down)

Hemoglobin: 8.3 (down)

Platelets: 28 (down)

Today was the last day of the VOD treatment! ZiLong received his last dose of defibritide (the 2 hour IV every 6 hours for the last 3 weeks) this morning at 10 am.  We also received an early wake up call with his weekly liver ultrasound actually happening this morning at 6 am.  They have suggested a few weeks it would be at 6 am, but it never actually came to fruition.  This morning when I woke up at 6, our nurse said "we are going to Ultrasound in 5 minutes!"  

Dr Walters was on rounds again this week so he was very happy with how ZiLong's liver looked and felt and was happy to finish the VOD treatment today and did not feel it needed any additional attention.  His counts were all down, but this is the first day of not having GCFS, so it shows us a bit more realistically where his counts currently sit.  They may al still come down a bit tomorrow, but we were really happy to see his ANC above 500.  The threshold for platelets has been 30 while he was being treated for the VOD, but today they said they would lover the threshold to 10, so he did not need platelets today and chances are good he should get through the end of the week without needing them.

I have been busy working to re-build ZiLong's beads of courage with the help of one of the nurses here, Marianne. She is the nurse who got this hospital started in their participation on Beads of Courage, and we are so appreciative that she has helped us to re-build Zilong's string of beads!

I did not do a third dressing change on Chester today, I did one on ZiLong while the nurse watched to ensure I knew what to do. I also started learning line flushing and heparin locking, and how to collect blood for bloodwork that we will have to do once a week.