Sunday Dec. 12th (Day +3)

It's Kristy writing again...Brian's been in bed most of the day.  He's feeling pretty bad and not looking foward to potentially feeling worse over the next week.  His creatinine today was 4.9 and they're going to check it again in about an hour.  No plans for dialysis yet, just monitoring things.  He's still producing a lot of urine and his electrolytes are ok.  They said at this point it's unlikely to need dialysis, but they still want to keep him because it's a fine balance between a high creatinine and a low white blood cell (WBC) count.  His WBC count today is 0.7, they expect it to drop again and hit it's low point tomorrow.  Dr. Aljitawi rounded on him again this morning and said that it may not drop all the way to zero, it may bottom out at 0.2 or 0.3...we'll see.  Then they start giving him the Neupogen shots again on Tuesday to "encourage" his stem cells to come out of the bone marrow and start fighting infections.  Hemoglobin was 6.8, so it's also dropping but no blood transfusions yet.  Platelets are 144, they haven't budged too much in the past few days, so we're good there.
Basically, we know we're entering a very hard week, but that doesn't make it any easier to cope with feeling like crap.  At least he still doesn't have any mouth sores or skin rashes, that's a plus for him!  At the moment it's still difficult to eat and drink just because of the thick coating in his mouth and throat - he feels like he's going to choke every time he tries to eat something solid.  Nausea is still slightly problematic but it's getting better.
That's about all for now, I'll write more tomorrow.