All for JP, none for ALL: Admitted

On Friday morning JP woke up and he felt warm to me so we took a temp of 99. That's kind of high for him so I sort of knew what was coming. He usually hovers around 96-97 degrees so a 99 is definitely higher. A cancer kid doesn't have the immune system to fight any infections in his body so any illness will always manifest itself with a fever. If he gets a fever of 100.4 that stays for an hour or if it ever hits 101 we are supposed to go straight to the ER. He was acting especially cranky - yep, even more cranky than what the terrible two's give us - and was super emotional. We have been semi-prepared for a hospital stay because everyone warned us that Delayed Intensification is so hard to get through, but we had almost made it - Friday marked week six of the eight week plan - and ironically he literally had taken his last dose of chemo for this phase and we were technically supposed to be in "recovery" for the next two weeks with no medication aside from his normal antibiotics he takes on Mondays and Tuesdays.

We were checking his temperature every 10 minutes, who does that? I guess when you're a paranoid parent you do. When it started reading in the 100 range we decided to pack a couple things he would need and some things for Josh as well because he'd be the sleepover buddy. We knew very well that a neutropenic fever meant a 48-hour hospital stay so we figured if we went in we were going to be there for a while. Sure enough, his temp hit 100.5 and 100.8 and after arranging for a neighbor to take Elsie we were off to Primary Children's. By the time we got there his temp hit 102 and we knew we were just waiting on a room.

They took us upstairs and put us in room 4416. This is a special room - you have to walk in one door to this small room with some cupboards and then you walk through another door to get into the real hospital room. They said it's a negative-air thing (or something like that) where when you open the first door it sucks in air from the hallway into that first room and then when you open the hospital room door it sucks the air from the extra room into your room. Basically it makes sure that the air in the hospital room stays there instead of being able to get out into the hallway. These rooms are for the cancer kids with contagious diseases that could get the other cancer patients sick (or sick-er than what the cancer is already doing to them). We felt so special! It was just a precaution in case JP had something viral, which he doesn't.

They took some blood for cultures and did a nose swab on him. The blood takes at least 48 hours to show if something is growing and the nose swab tested for 9 things that they know are floating around the community - like colds, flus, etc. So far everything has come back negative which just means either it's something more or less serious than a cold. They did say they are waiting on urine cultures which may be showing something, but they were able to keep his fever down with some Tylenol and they got him going on some serious antibiotics so whatever was making him sick was being treated at least somewhat. Did you notice that I said they are testing his urine? That means they have some of his urine which means he had to pee into a cup for them which means that is exciting news because we've been potty training the little mister and we thought for sure this weekend in the hospital would put us back to square one but IT DIDN'T!

They discharged us (yay!) and now we get to do at-home IV antibiotics 3x each day (10 am, 6 pm & 2 am) and a CBC (complete blood count) on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays until his ANC (ability to fight infections) reaches at least 500. His ANC was 100 on Friday and 200 today, but that's not necessarily an indication that it will be 400 in a couple days. ANC's are funny little things. They go up and down based upon... nothingness. Nobody knows how to get it to increase, obviously illness will cause it to drop, but there is nothing we can do to "help" it get higher. We will just keep drawing blood until it is high enough to stop the antibiotics.

For now JP and Josh are both napping while I try to type this and keep Elsie quiet. She's usually a great napper so I thought we were golden when we came home but she had other plans... :)

In the ER, feeling crappy