So we are basically here just waiting for his ANC to go up. We have had some good signs in the past few days. His ANC had dropped to 140 earlier this week, but he is now back up to 385 today. Hopefully this is the upward trend that the oncologists are expecting to happen and when it gets up over 500 we can think about going home.
In the mean time, we have had a few other minor complications that we are dealing with. One of the issues has been that Oliver's sodium levels have been low, and so they have put him on a restricted fluid intake diet. Our best guess is that the steroids he is on have caused his appetite to accelerate so rapidly that he has been retaining too much water. In addition, there can be the steroids cause water gain which could also be a cause. Apparently it is not an unusual side effect of the chemo protocol his is on. The doctors want to get it into control because there are a number of much more serious complications that could occur from low sodium levels. Luckily his sodium levels seem to be responding to the fluid intake restrictions and so hopefully they won't need to resort to more drastic measures.
We have also had a bit of an issue with his bowel movements, by which I mean poops. They have been a bit loose, by which I mean he has had diarrhea. (I don't know why I have such a strong urge to use euphemisms to talk about poop and diarrhea, when there is nothing really wrong the words to begin with.) So because we are in the hospital they wanted to test for C.diff (clostridium difficile), since they would need to take infectious disease precautions if he did have it. The test came back negative, so we are pretty sure his is just having some kind of diet related issue.
