Wednesday 3rd February 2010

I'm running a bit late with the blog entry tonight. It's now 9pm and I've just walked in the door at home from taking Amy in this afternoon and having dinner with Murray (lovely lasagne from Luke's aunty Nat).

As I mentioned last night Luke got a temperature of 38 degrees. As soon as they reach this level they follow protocol and give antibiotics via the drip every 4 hours for 48 hours. They had the on call doctor come and they wanted to do blood cultures to see if any infection was growing. This means having blood taken from two different parts of the body (some out of his central line and some out of his vein).
As it turned out within about 90 minutes his temperature was back down to 37 degrees but they still have to continue the antibiotics.

Luke probably started to settle down to sleep around 10pm last night and then woke at 2.30am / 5am and then 7am - that is around the drip machine beeping when it's running low and nurses sticking their head in for various other things. So he and Murray or I get quite disjointed sleep.

This morning he started eating a weetbix and got presented with his 8 steroid tablets for the day and a mixture of 5 other daily tablets. Unfortunately breakfast and the tablets didn't stay down and he had to take the dosage again around lunch time. He was booked in for a test at 9am and they decided to pick him up at 8.15am and take him down for a chest xray first. He then had a gamma ray snapshot of his heart. This involved injecting a trace element into his body that would attach to the red blood cells. After about half an hour they then inject a bit of radiation that attaches to the trace element/red blood cells and take images of his heart. These are base line indicators for them to compare down the track whether his heart is coping okay with the chemo.

We arrived back on the ward around 10.30am and he was still feeling really nauseous. Murray arrived around 11.30am and bought a cheesymite scroll in for his lunch from Bakers Delight. He managed to eat a bit of this to get his steroid tablets down with.
He then had a shower and decided to head into the courtyard for a bit of fresh air.

I then went to our own doctor (on Murray's continual pushing) to get my blood pressure checked as I was diagnosed with high blood pressure a few months before Xmas. It was fine but she was worried that I'm not sleeping too well so I now have a sleeping tablet to take when I'm on my night at home.
While I was away the Dietician came in and had a talk to the boys about the special diet he will need to have while he is neutropenic. She showed them a drink he can have called Endure. It's a chocolate milk drink that gives you energy - like Sustain. He had this and really enjoyed it and it seemed to fill him up! So now we will be making sure this gets ordered each day for him.

Unfortunately Luke had another chemo treatment this afternoon. This involved an injection into his backside of L-Asparaginase. Luke told me imagine a bee sting and times it by 10 - 20 times. That's what it feels like and the pain lasts for over an hour. He's didn't enjoy this one at all and unfortunately he will have this every 3 days for the next 4 weeks. Good to see that the boys still have their sense of humour - they reckon Luke has 3 pains in the arse now - Me, Amy and the needle!!!

Luke has a day off tomorrow from any treatment or tests (that we know about anyway)- so hopefully he can rest up and build up some strength for the next bee sting that will happen on Friday. (I know that's not 3 days but they started this one on Day 2 and the next one is Day 4 and every 3rd day after that).

Thank you all so much for the continuing emails/messages of support. We have been overwhelmed with offers of help. As I mentioned at this stage we are doing well as we have so much family in Canberra supporting us. If we do need your help down the track with meals etc we know we have lots of people to ask.