February 24th, 2013
Howdy,
Quick note, she started to slip a little this afternoon, got the shakes worse than I've seen at all in this process. They have given her a pain pump, with an itty bitty little dose of Fentanyl, (a narcotic) because of the pain in her mouth. She has this nasty sore throat that they can't seem to identify the cause of and started to get flem(ier) like I mentioned.
Oh there it is...I just realized why "flem" looked weird...its p-h-l-e-g-m. I'm an idiot.
ANYway...the sore throat thing really sucks, hence the pain pump. She has not however had to use it which is nice because narcotics and her get along like ___ and ___.
Becasue of the extra p-h-l-e-g-m, and some difficulty keeping her oxygen levels up they decided to do a chest x-ray to rule out pneumonia, which they were able to do - chest is clear! The blood cultures from yesterday morning were also clear, so that means that so far they have found no existence of a bacterial infection. Which is great. That does not however remove the fact that something is infected and the general belief right now is that its viral. Which sucks. Antibiotics don't take care of that. However, I still stand that we are headed in the right direction and our doc was supremely confident of that as well. We've had for the most part superb care here (I had to take one nurse out back and have a "win one for the Gipper" with her, and we actually ended up politely requesting a new nurse - we got the nurse from yesterday though and she is great!) and we're pretty happy with how they are choosing to tackle her care.
Please, please continue to pray for her health. Specifically for white blood cells and neutrophyls to come up. Quick biology lesson here: of the white blood cells that one normally has, a safe range is 4,000-10,000/15,000 white blood cells per cubic milligram (or milliliter, can't remember) of blood. Of those white blood cells, 50%-60% of them are neutrophyls. Don't ask me what the heck a neutrophyl actually is, we just know they are the footsoldiers of the immune system. Adrienne started out yesterday morning with 700 white blood cells and 7 neutrophyls. Yes, 7. This morning she was up to 1,100 WBC, and 11 neutrophyls. Make sense? That's why we are concerned, this is an extremely low number obviously. A doable neutrophyl count is 500, according to our doc.
That will be $150 bucks please.
She is better now than when I started this email. The chills are gone for now, she is warm enough, had a few M&Ms which if you've ever met my wife the sugar-Nazi, you know THAT"S a big deal. For now we are good. A scare this afternoon, but we focus on this minute and the movie thats on and the comfort she is currently in.
The prayer at this moment is for her body to strengthen what we have been told is probably viral. Since all the cultures and swabs (that measure bacterial infections) have come back negative, the next most likely suspect is a virus. Unfortunately, antibiotics don't work on viruses. Ya just gotta tough it out.
So...that's that. Hope you a reading this while sitting in front of a nice fireplace with a cup of cocoa or something in your hands. Take a swig for us.
Love, love, love!
J
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