Monday

As you can see, I have included a reference guide for the blood counts at normal range in the Cancer Information tab. That will help me avoid having to explain things too much each time I comment on them. Today we were hoping to get good news. The news we got was that Sam's ANC (Gran Count) is down to 476 from 518 yesterday, the other numbers are up: hemoglobin 11.5, platelets 182 (actually this is down from 185), WBC is 1.7 and ANC 476. So, much of it is still below normal but the magic number is an ANC of 5oo which pulls Sam out of the "severely neutropenic" range. They have no idea why he keeps getting fevers, the cultures still only show the rhino virus (cold)! The counts were exceedingly low all week as shown below:

                    6-Jan  7-Jan   8-Jan  9-Jan 10-Jan



Hemoglobin   8        7.6    10.5    10.9     10.8
Platelets         170    181    191    189      185
WBC              1.4     1.1        ?      1.2      1.4
ANC              56       30      176    312      518


The bummer is that Sam will have to have his port changed today if he stays. That means pulling out the needle and reinserting a new one...ouch!!!! He is not going to be happy and it is going to be a very traumatic time. The worst part will be getting the sticky off...he still hates it.

Hopefully someone who can make a decision will come by soon and let us know. For now, we are playing the waiting game.