Tyler’s doing great! Today they took him off two of his four antibiotics, and he seems to be doing fine with that. His blood pressure has been good as well! They also discontinued his continuous morphine since he has no more pain. Tomorrow, they will reduce his TPN from 24 hours to 20 hours, giving him a four hour window to be disconnected from his IV pole. Tyler got off his clear liquid restricted diet today and started eating a liltte bit. He took a few bites of mashed potatoes and finished some chicken noodle soup. Unfortunately, the chemo has taken away his ability to taste, so this wasn’t an enjoyable experience for him.
One of the meds they gave him in the ICU was a drug to stimuate neutrophil production in the bone marrow in order to help him fight his infection. Because of the drug, his neutrophil count went from zero yesterday to 202 today. Two hundred is the level they use for sending kids home from the hospital. Tomorrow they’ll stop this drug and see what his counts do on their own. It’s actually possible he could come home as early as this Friday! That has our heads spinning a little bit, seeing as we were just in the ICU 2 days ago! The nurses started educating me today on how to care for his central line. Hopefully he won’t have to come home on any intravenous fluids or TPN – I don’t think I’m ready for that. Anyway, compared to this time last week, these are all good problems to have!