Hello everyone,
We wanted to give a quick update on Elijah. Some of you already know that Elijah is in the hospital as of Christmas day. What kind of a Christmas would it be for us if we weren't in the hospital??? We woke up on Christmas day and had a great morning of opening presents and watching the kids be amazed at what Santa brought them. It was great, but right after we got done opening presents Elijah said he was tired and wanted to go and lay down. Levi came back in the other room where we all were and asked me if I wanted to go and feel his head. I said, NO!!! He better not have a fever!" Well he did and so I called the doctor. We were able to give him some Tylenol and not have to take him in right away. His fever broke for awhile but after a few hours it was back and we had to take him in. We went to the ER hoping that his counts would be high enough to just give him some antibiotics and send him home. Dr Al-Zein saw him in the ER and I was a little pushy to have him discharge us. His counts weren't great (ANC was around 800), but Dr agreed to send us home if we would follow up in the clinic the next day. We went home and at about 5am Elijah woke up with a fever of 103 and hives all over his body. I knew that we were headed back to the hospital for admission at that point. We have been in the hospital ever since (which is why I have time to update our blog). Elijah's counts dropped over the first couple of days to around 400 ANC. They had stopped his chemo until his counts recovered. On Monday his counts were back up to 950, but he was still having the fevers and hives. Dr. Woods (new partner to the group) said that she had thought about sending us home since his counts had recovered, but she was baffled as to why he was still having fevers. They have thought all along that he has some virus because none of the cultures have grown bacteria. She told us that she wanted to give him one more day of antibiotics but she would probably let us go the next day. Then, because Elijah is Elijah and he can't be normal in any kind of way, he had two of the highest fevers he has had since he was admitted lat night (Monday night into Tuesday morning). One of them got to 104. She apologised this morning when she came to see him that she had told us that we might be going home, because he was going to be staying. Not only did he have those two really high fevers, but his counts that had recovered have now started falling again. Since Dr. Woods is new to the group I had to inform her of Elijah and his non-normalcy. I told her if she was thinking that he would do something then he would do the exact opposite. She decided to order a CT scan from head to toe to look for a source of infection, and really to start ruling things out. She said when he is on his 5th day of fevers, you have to start running tests to rule things out and not just rely on him having a virus. Elijah has had a couple more fevers throughout the day today and we haven't heard anything back on the CT scan yet. At this point it's hard to know what to think or what to expect as far as going home. Woody and Melissa (Levi's older brother and sister-in-law) have willingly taken the girls once again and we are so grateful to them for doing that. They have four of their own, so adding 3 more isn't an easy task. A HUGE thank-you to them for being so great!!! That's all for now, hope all of you had a great Christmas and have a happy New Year!! I'm starting to think that we will be ringing in the new year the same as we did last year, from our hospital room. Well, I do have to say that we are in much better shape than we were last year at this time and we are defiantly grateful for that. When we were admitted, Dr. Al-Zein told us that he was on his way to sign a DNR (do not resuscitate) order with a family whose little one was not going to make it. As sad as I was about being back in the hospital on Christmas, it put into perspective how lucky we were to just be in the hospital with a fever. We love all of you and hope you all have happy holidays!!
Love, Levi, Amanda, Michelle, Elijah, Alivia and Tysa