Olivia white blood count is rising! The downside is that she feels pretty terrible. She's covered in an engraftment rash (this is a good thing because it means that the cells are growing which was our goal all along) but it's hard to see her so uncomfortable. Olivia is on constant pain medication through her "tubbie". Yesterday afternoon during her disconnection time (Olivia gets disconnected from all of her IV medication for 1-2 hours a day every afternoon, we have come to treasure this time as she's allowed to run and roam freely without being connected to her pole) we realized that she had been disconnected from her pain meds a little bit too long. Olivia was disconnected for almost 2 hours yesterday and by the time she was finally reconnected she was in so much pain. Olivia was crying because she was hurting, I was crying because she was in pain and I couldn't do anything. The poor nurse was trying to hurry to get us reconnected and she ended up dropping one of the medications which happens to come in a glass jar so we had to get that cleaned up. By the time Olivia was finally reconnected they gave her some extra boosts of her pain medication to make her more comfortable but so much pain medication all at once made Olivia start to itch. The itchiness of the pain medication combined with the itchiness of her engraftment rash were a terrible combination and Olivia was pretty much whimpering in pain for most of the night. Thankfully she did finally fall asleep around 4:30 and slept till about 8:30 this morning.
I was really excited about the prospect of taking a shower this morning and was all ready to go but then the shower was occupied and by the time it was available Olivia was awake.
Olivia is finally napping now! I know that I should try and get some rest too but sleeping in the hospital during the day is even harder than sleeping in the hospital at night.
For those of you who have questions about the engraftment process here's a link to some very useful info!
http://www.marrow.org/PATIENT/Donor_Select_Tx_Process/Waiting_for_Engraftment_Days_0/index.html
Maybe now I'll try and take a shower....
Building of Medieval Cathedrals Built
6 years ago
2 comments:
aww, break my heart, hope you got your shower!
Hi Laurie Leiva,
It looks like you're taking great care of Olivia. Make sure to get some rest thoguh!
I'm Hua, the director of Wellsphere's HealthBlogger Network, a network of over 2,000 of the best health writers on the web (including doctors, nurses, healthy living professionals, and expert patients). I think your blog would be a great addition to the Network, and I'd like to invite you to learn more about it and apply to join at http://www.wellsphere.com/health-blogger. Once approved by our Chief Medical Officer, your posts will be republished on Wellsphere where they will be available to over 5 million monthly visitors who come to the site looking for health information and support. There’s no cost and no extra work for you! The HealthBlogger page (http://www.wellsphere.com/health-blogger) provides details about participation, but if you have any questions please feel free to email me at hua@wellsphere.com.
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