OK, So Not Just on Wednesday

Well, it didn't take until Wednesday to have another tough day. Friday, Joshua began complaining that his ear hurt and within an hour, we were headed to the clinic with another fever and an ear infection. Dr. Domm quickly wrote a perscription for Aumaxicilin and sent us on our way. I chuckled to myself because it was nice to be perscribe the same medicine as every other child with an infection. Just as we packed up our things to go, Dr. Domm said, "Hey, let's wait and see what Joshua's counts are before you head out."

Much to our dismay, Joshua's white count had dropped from 3.8 to 0.2 and his ANC had dropped from 2.89 to 0.03 in about a week. His counts have not been this low since April. Just a brief leukemia refersher here, but the white blood cells are the ones that fight infection. Chemotherapy attacks the bad blood cells as well as the good, so chemo can reduce his ability to fight off other sicknesses. Combine that with an ear infection which also uses up white blood cells, and you get a low count. The ANC is sort of a composite number that is a good indicator of his overall ability to fight infection. It's also a good indicator of how he feels. When he feels really good, that number is above 3. It's down to .2. So they checked us into the hospital, not just for the infection, but walking around in the real world with numbers like that means basically walking through a germ minefield with no protection. So here we sit in the hospital.

It's not so bad. Joshua gets to have a grilled cheese sandiwth twice a day, watch alot of TV and have everyone pay attention to him. We catch up on blogging. So it has its perks. There's also alot of time to think.

It feels odd that we have been doing this for almost a year now. If you don't remember Joshua was diagnosed on October 18th of last year. So we're spending alot of time thinking about how life is different from then until now. A future blog perhaps? Until then, we are praying for blood counts to come up.