Quieter
I first want to reiterate something: Brendan does not want visitors. At all. No, not you, or you, or even you. No one but me. Trust me, I ask him every couple days, but he doesn’t want to see anyone. Due to an incident last night, he has told the nurses that no one is to be admitted in to see him unless they have my prior written consent. This is HIS choice, not mine, and it must be respected. The most important thing is his health, and this effects both his mental and physical health. Please don’t turn up at the hospital, you will be turned away without seeing him. At the same time, food/flowers aren’t permitted either. Flowers aren’t allowed on the ward at all, and as he is on a special diet because of being neutropenic, so most foods he won’t be able to eat. And to be honest, he doesn’t have a huge appetite, so please save it for the celebrations once he comes home.
That said, today was a quiet day. Part of it is because it’s a national holiday, so there most of the Monday to Friday staff of the hospital were home. Also because B didn’t have that much going on today. Chemo, some antibiotics, and a couple bags of platelets. That’s sorta it. He was much more relaxed today, being off the oxygen for a while again, and just chatting. We tried to make the radio work on his phone (still, no. Stupid EDGE in the hospital.) We went for a tiny walk, cause he wasn’t hooked up to the IV, and played a hand of gin rummy. That sorta exhausted him, but he really really wanted to do all of it. I don’t know if he’s feeling better per se, but he was able to get out of the bed and move around, which is big and made him happy. His numbers today were:
WBC: 0.3
Hemoglobin: 8.9
Platelets: 36
The nurses said that he’ll get two bags of platelets tonight, to keep his platelet count up, and one early tomorrow morn. Don’t forget, he’s getting a bronchoscopy in the morning, so they want his clotting factor (which platelets help with, if I’m getting this right) to be up high in case of…anything, I guess. We won’t think about that. The bronch is to check his lung infection, possibly to get a sample of it, so that they can really target the infection and wipe it out. Any infection right now is dangerous for him, having almost no immune system (another reason to keep Eoin away…4 year olds are germ factories. But he’s a cute germ factory.)
By the time I head in tomorrow and get to him, he should have just started his last bag of the first round of chemo. It seemed so far away before, and now it’s here. After this, it’s two weeks of sitting and waiting and seeing what his counts are, plus the platelets and blood and antibiotics. We’ll know sometime in a week how things are looking, I think. His lovely bro has already had his tests done to see if he’s a bone marrow match, waiting for those results still I think. Probably get those faxed to the doc here tomorrow. We hope it doesn’t get to that point, but also we have to be realistic and know that everything is on the table until we get more numbers. Once again, we’re just looking one, maybe two, days ahead of now. If we get beyond that, well, things can always change, so there’s almost no point. We shall keep doing what we’re doing, as it seems to be working so far!
Today’s shoutouts: All three aunts (H, M, S) who came to be with the boys so I could head in for a couple hours today, even with a tummy bugged Eoin; Anne, for the lovely fish pie; Derry, for being Derry; and Declan, for coming down and checking in every night.
