A Scare

Audrey is back in the hospital. She wasn't feeling well after her outpatient Vincristine yesterday. She was really dumpy and pale. After a few hours she was asking for more clothes to put on because she was so cold. None of that made sense to me because her hemoglobin levels were fairly high. So I just figured she was feeling dumpy because of the chemo.

As we were getting ready to put her to bed I held her and immediately knew she had a temperature. Ryan grabbed the thermometer and we took several readings, all of which were alarming and needed to be followed by a call to her oncologist. We were told to drive into the hospital.

All of her counts dropped, fairly dramatically. Her white blood count is extremely important. It is our white blood cells that fight off infection. Because these blood cells multiply rapidly the chemo targets and kills them (because cancer sells multiply rapidly the chemo kills all rapidly multiplying cells - thus the loss of hair, etc). Once her white count is down she is susceptible to any kind of infection and her chances increase dramatically when she is running a fever. If she contracts an infection while running a fever she could die.

For this reason we didn't play around with Tylenol and trying to lower the fever on our own. She had another blood transfusion last night and will likely have platelets (helps with clotting blood and helps to prevent against bruising among other things) tomorrow. We do not know how long she will be hospitalized. We are expecting at least through the weekend. However, it may be longer as the doctor wants to see Audrey's numbers start to climb before she is released. In the meantime she is pumped full of fluids for hydration and given antibiotics to fight any infection that may come our way.