Improving

Tyler made it through the night with flying colors. His white blood cell count is down to 18 (from 104 yesterday morning) after taking hydrea and getting the pheresis last night. We haven't seen his blast count yet from the 6am labs, but I'm hoping that it might be down too.

They ran the pheresis machine from about 1-4 am, so we were pretty tuckered out after that. We'll likely try to sleep as much as we can today to make up for it. It's always tough to sleep in the hospital, with frequent interruptions for tests and observations, but they know we had a rough night so will hopefully do what they can to group things together today.

He's still bleeding from the insertion of the neck catheter, but it does look like it has slowed a little bit. Hopefully they feel safe in giving Tyler some platelets today to encourage it to clot.

His kidneys have held up so far, although I think they are more worried about how they will behave with the chemo killing everything off.

They started the chemo this morning. He's getting fludarabine, cytarabine, and a third drug we haven't seen before. I can't find the name of it right now...

He feels and looks much better this morning with a little bit more energy and alertness, so that is reassuring too. The doctor told me yesterday that Tyler is an amazingly tough guy. He always looks much better than he should when they get these shocking test results. I don't think he intentionally tries to hide anything, just that his body doesn't feel as sick as some people would in these situations. I suspect it is due to the all of the good clean living he's had -- working hard and playing soccer led to a strong, strong body. In fact, I always laugh when we read the notes from SCCA after we have a big visit with them. They describe Tyler as a "well formed adult male". I keep warning him about getting a big head from the fact that all of the doctors at SCCA think he's hot!

Thanks for the many prayers and the encouragement to get through yesterday's day of rough news and last night's treatments. I hope that we can continue to improve today and get out of the woods soon. We really don't want to move to the ICU unit if we can avoid it (although we have nothing against the 8th floor nurses if any of them are checking this). :)