Another Hiccup

This morning Joshua woke up at 6 am complaining that his stomach was hurting.  I quickly realized that his pain was more intense than I first suspected. He seemed to be showing signs of an oncoming virus, so we called the clinic to find out what our next step should be.

Even without a fever, they wanted to see Joshua. Apparently, stomach pain can be the sign of several different things that leukemia patients have to face. (Thinking back, this is a question they ask often during routine visits.) At the clinic, he started to feel better, eating crackers, drinking Sprite (lots of Sprite) and stuff. His blood tests showed a couple of things - first that his white cell count was pretty high, and second that his liver enzymes were a little higher than they were the last time they checked them. The doctors seemed to think that these things are all linked together, along with the nausea and stomach pain.

We've been reading this afternoon a little about liver stuff online (which is never an advisable thing to do when you have a kid with leukemia), but we did anyway. It seems that chemo drugs can cause liver problems. We know this also because a few of our friends from blog world seem to have had liver enzyme issues due to the medication. This may be happening in Joshua's case as well.

So they sent us home, nothing to do but wait. We'll go back on Wednesday to have another round of blood tests and see if the enzyme level has returned to normal. I assume that if it hasn't, we might have to adjust medication once again. We'll see what happens. So for now, the battle cry is: "Enzymes down, God."