Day +13 Engraftment!!

It's official!  Sam's wbc has been increasing for the past three days, and his doctors are confident his new cells have started engrafting.  We didn't want to say anything until we knew for sure this time.

His doctors are sending up the infectious disease team since he's been spiking fevers and chilling for the past 5 days, and they're not sure why.  At this point he's feeling pretty darn miserable so the news this morning was perfect.  

Day +10 *update*

So apparently someone down in the lab this morning confused a 1 with a 7.  His WBC is still 0.1.  We were a little discouraged, but found ourselves feeling really bad for the poor nurse practitioner who had to tell us.

Thank you Atlantic Veterinary College class of 2015 for the awesome video!  Pretty hard to be bummed after watching that :)

 

Day +10

Great news this morning!  Sam's white blood cell count has jumped to 0.7!!  Thank you Lord!!  They're looking for this number to remain high for three days in a row to indicate official engraftment, but we're still really excited.  They switched his pain medication over to a constant basal rate last night since the button just wasn't getting the job done anymore.  Once his counts increase and stay up, many of those painful side effects will go away.  Keep those prayers, vibes and well wishes coming!

 
And a big congratulations to Dave and Jeanne Talbot!  They welcomed their beautiful daughter Charley into the world early this morning.  Such a good day.

Day +8

Another OK day!  His liver levels have finally plateaued with the lower drug doses, and hopefully they'll start to decrease over the next few days.  He will not be getting another round of stem cells like his doctors had hoped.  Apparently his donor had checked a box while filling out her forms that stated she did not want to be contacted about future donations so they weren't even able to ask her.  And that's OK.  She's already done so much for us.  He received the minimum baseline amount so that may mean engraftment might take a little longer.  But maybe not, who knows.  His doctors seem OK with this, so we are too.  He slept again for most of the day.  He's said he's never in his life been this tired. 

A few more fun deliveries!

a sweet and thoughtful gift bag from Val and Brian Kelly!

and a box from shutterfly with a deck of cards and a puzzle featuring photos from our wedding! thank you Leanne Dellibovi!!