Day 18, 19: Waiting for Engraftment

The days are becoming quite monotonous. Which, is a good thing. A boring thing, but a good thing. It means there is no excitement and AJ's body continues to slowly improve. They draw AJ's blood at 4:00 am. We get the lab results back around 6:00 am. The rest of the day it feels like we are waiting for 4:00 am. AJ's netrophil count was above 200 yesterday, but slipped back to 150 this morning. His platelets have remained stable and for the first time we have seen increased counts in his red blood cells. We have been told that every child is different but that most have their white cells recover first followed by red blood cells and lastly by platelets. AJ's body seems to be working on recovery of all three cell lines at the same time. Hopefully that will mean that when we do get released he won't need additional transfusions. It has been a week since his last blood product tranfusion. That was for platelets and his body has done well to maintain the post tranfusion platelet level all week, roughly bouncing around the 40 - 50 thousand range. (Normal is 150,000 -300,000). We continued to play games and watch movies.

One thing that changes each day, is the hat of day. This one was another hit with the nurses: