*9:30 a.m. Bennett’s ANC is 984! WBC is 4.1 from 2.0 and 24 neutrophils from 11! We are thankful it has gone up and hopefully will continue to rise each day. His hemoglobin is 9.8 from 8.9, awesome! And platelets are 138 from 123. These is good news, that is bone marrow is making cells and the fever/infection is not killing them.

His temp has been 99.1 late last night and 98.4 this morning! We hope this continues too. It’s hard to get too excited because his temp was normal a few days ago but came back up. We will just pray that it continues to stay normal and that his ANC will continue to rise. Both of these things will help him feel better too.

He woke up this morning around 8:30 and is having trouble going back to sleep. His pain when he woke up was about 6 1/2, he said he felt better when he firsts wakes up. But the pain now, he says is a 9. He was given the oxy every 4 hours throughout the night. Next dose is at 9:45 am.

12:00 p.m. Bennett woke up again around 11:00 and ate his daily ritual of pancakes and cereal. His temp is 99.3. Shoot, was hoping it would stay normal or even below. His temp usually is around 97 at home. The Dr.’s have increased his pain pills. He is now taking oxycontin every 12 hours. And he still can get the oxycodine every 4 hours. They reduced the oxycodine to 5 mg from 10 mg since he will be getting the oxycontin as well. They took him off the iv pain drip because dilaudid can cause headaches. It’s rare for this to happen but it can.

Dr.’s don’t really know what is causing the headache, still possible the spinal tap headache or from the sinusitis. To treat a spinal headache, they would normally do a blood patch, taking the blood from the patient and putting it into the spine to stop the leakage causing the spinal headache. But they cannot do this with Bennett, they do not want to give him his own blood in his spine because he is running a low grade fever (signs of infection) and his ANC is too low. And normally a spinal headache would be gone after 9 days for other patients because they do a blood patch and it’s gone. So no history to really to compare too for Bennett.

I am thinking it may just take time for Bennett’s low grade fever go away, for the antibiotics to work. He has a record of when his ANC drops severely low that it takes weeks to re-build. And I think he had so much puss and mucus in his sinuses that it is taking awhile for the inflamation to go down therefore relieving him of the headache. We pray and hope that this is all it is. We are so thankful to hear from the Ct scans last week that no tumor or anything else is going on. This gives us strength to keep dealing with this; it could be worse.

He is still getting colace, senna, and myrlax twice a day for constipation. Pepcid for heartburn. And still getting caffeine once a day at 500 mg. Three antiobiotics: meropenum & vancomycin every 8 hours with benedryl, and fluconazole every 12 hrs, and saline nasal spray. Plus will get iv neupogen again tonight to help increase his ANC.

*6:30 p.m. Bennett’s temp 99.5 all afternoon. He has been itching even more today and has asked for attaraks and nu ban to help with that. It’s made him quite irritable and is aggravated easy. His headache pain was better, down to a 6. It got worse after he washed his hair. Recently his headache pain is about a 7 on the left side of his head. He is eating good, had pizza again for dinner. We wished we were home, Hamilton has a practice game tonight that we are missing and Bennett’s westie Katie had 5 puppies today!

*9:30 p.m. Bennett temp is now 99.1. I wish he would just break this low grade. His head on the top and left/right sides were bothering him worse. He said about an 8. He is talking about things that he misses at home so I know he is wishing he would be better so he could go.

Please say an extra prayer for all the children here in the hospital. It’s pretty sad and frustrating that these sweet innocent kids are suffering. We don’t even really know many families here now. There has been about 15 new diagnosis this month. How ridiculous! Some are told there is nothing else the Dr.’s can do for their child, how devasting. We see several patients in clinic that we have met that are still in treatment. Please pray for them too. All of these children are special hero’s. We pray that our heavenly father will lay his hand on them and cure them of their disease.