Let’s face it, there is nothing like a 9 hour day at the hospital to make you feel more like it’s good to be home.  After leaving the house around 7:30am for what was supposed to be routine lab work and not to return until after 6:00pm, you know you are on hospital time.  We arrived and had Travis’ blood drawn and then it is typically about an hour before the lab results are back.  They determined that his ANC (absolute neutrophil count or first responders to infection) is 0 so we need to be very careful about infections.  Travis’ ANC has been low before but never zero.  It would have been nice to know that before we were shaking hands with everyone at church yesterday.  Also his platelets are low so we need to be careful that he doesn’t get bruised easily or any kind of nick or cut since the clotting will not be as effective.   Then to top it off, his hemoglobin was right on the border of needing a blood transfusion.  They decided to go ahead with the transfusion so we didn’t have to come back tomorrow and ordered up some blood.  We sort of anticipated this so we brought lunch and plenty of things to do while we waited.

The nurses came in to access Travis’ port but the problem was the one doing the accessing was training to work in the oncology clinic.  In other words, she did not have much experience and it really hurt a lot.  It was enough to make him cry which he never does when being accessed.  Poor little guy!  By this time, it was close to noon so Tony decided to come down at lunch and spend an hour and a half with us.  They didn’t start the blood until 1:30pm and it takes three and a half hours to do the transfusion so we did not leave until 5:30pm.  At least we had some crafts to do, the Kindle to play on and some TV to watch.  Who would of thought flipping houses could be so interesting but the before and after is so cool?

Where does the day go when you are on hospital time?  You just have to battle on!

Thanks,

Lynne and Tony