I suppose it might be a good detail to share with the world of non-facebookers (which I am most definitely sure is now a legitimate phrase), but Tom did in fact make it home for Wednesday! He was actually home about lunch time, which by hospital standards is amazing.
Monday he had been given the news that it might actually be Thursday or Friday, which was quite the let down for Tom. I'm not sure that I've mentioned it before, but a guy that he knows via his job at Pool Corp (a customer) who ended up being diagnosed with AML received his transplant a couple of weeks prior to Tom and was discharged a few days into Tom having arrived. Well, this guy had done extremely well in terms of not having any fevers, reactions, infections, etc...and made it out at Day +19. Well this guy's "record" (as it were) was quite the talk on the ward. Not only did Tom want to beat it, but so did an elderly gentleman who was also in prior to Tom (a real firecracker this guy). Well, the elder guy got out on day +20... which left Tom in the running to beat the record. This meant that when Tom was told on Monday (Day +17) that he might not be out until Thursday (+20) or Friday (+21)... well, it wasn't so good and I'll leave it at that.
Tuesday came around and words were spoken that Wednesday might be possible again. Tom actually had the nurse show him the evidence that the following day was a planned discharge. All day Tuesday he was charting the foods he was eating (as there was a bit of a conspiracy theory going on that the nurses wouldn't necessarily record all of the foods he was eating as he ate from home, rather than hospital mush so it looked like he had taken the anorexia route). Tom was really working it at all angles. Wednesday morning the doctor came in and Tom said, "what's the plan?" to which the doctor said, "for you to go home" (in a puzzled way) and Tom simply replied, "Good. Just checking."
So there you have it... we made it home. Tom's been extremely tired, he's also been battling the cough from the strep throat a bit and some random (non-nausea prompted) vomiting the first day or so. Lastly, he's got incredibly painful dry eyes that have been really making it hard for him. We got an ointment today that hopefully does the trick because the plain eye drops just weren't cutting it. Other than that, his counts are looking good. Things are going up, but his cells are still young cells so he's still very susceptible to infection and must take precautions (masks, neutropenic diet, no crowds, etc). He's so happy to be home though and we are of course very happy to have him home. He's still doing the every morning trip into the infusion center for lab draws to check levels of basic chems and anti-rejection med levels. Hopefully with the way things are going they'll begin to taper him down to a few times a week instead.
Hope everyone is doing well! We'll do our best to keep everyone posted. Right now is sort of a slow process of checking him for signs of GVHD and whatnot so hopefully the blogs will be very boring and not so frequent... as that would be a sign of nothing "exciting" or frightening happening.
Love to everyone! Hopefully soon we'll start getting blog updates from Tom instead of me! :)
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