Tuesday, 3rd February

Day 35 - Stem Cell Transplant

Today turned out to be worse and even tougher than yesterday.  My poor man.....

Jimmy has continued to spike temperatures all day, going up to 40.1 at a stage.  We still have the warning of this coming on when his whole body starts to shake.  The diarrhoea seems to have eased off a bit but I was told tonight that this will probably come back again.  They inserted a looooooong tube into his nose and down into his stomach to feed him as he has not eaten since yesterday and only managed one shake this morning.  In spite of not eating Jimmy is feeling very bloated.  They are feeding him at a rate on 10ml every hour.  This will go up.  Due to the high temperatures and his heart over working (every time he spikes a temperature his pulse rate goes through the roof) they now have him on oxygen permanently, this is another 2 tubes also though his nose.  They upped his antibiotics today to try and stop the temperature spikes.  He only urinated once today and they are now worried about his kidneys.  They tested this urine and found traces of ketones which could indicate another infection so he has to sip water as often as possible.  They attached another machine to his pole today which measures his CVP.  If I understand correctly this measures the amount of blood returning to his heart and they do this reading before and after each bag of whatever is transfused into him.  This is probably the wrong terminology but half you wouldn't know that anyway ;) .  Jimmy has now started to get bone pain in his pelvis and the long bones in his legs which is a result of the Neupogen injections.  In between temperature spikes he is sleeping quite a lot, although not very deeply.  He says he isn't sleeping at night and the sister told me they can't give him a sleeping tablet because his blood pressure is dangerously low and the side effect of the sleeping tablet is lowered blood pressure.  I apologise if this all sounds a bit matter of fact and bit point form-ish but there is just so much going on at the moment.  And at last a little bit of good news - his white blood count is now 0.4, this was 0.3 yesterday which means those stemmies are grafting.

A big thanks to all you guy friends who have sent him messages to his phone.  He hasn't even looked at his phone in 2 days so I read them all to him today and he still managed a smile.

Stan and Michelle printed a huge photo of the two of us standing on a wooden walkway in the forest in Natures Valley in January and gave it to me with strict instructions that it had to go on the wall where Jimmy can see it.  Thanks so much, me mentioned twice what a nice photo it is.  In fact the second time I thought he was hallucinating because I had forgotten it was up there.



It really is starting to look like spaghetti junction with all the tubes and bags