Playing Catch-Up

Once again, I must apologize for a long delay between posts. Unfortunately, Benjamin's fever lingered and took some time to resolve itself. And once we figured out what was going on with him, I got knocked on my tush by a bad cold which had me banished from the hospital for the better part of a week, as the rest of the family scrambled to take over here.

We're all better now, but still here and waiting for Ben's counts to come up again. Tomorrow will be a month since we were admitted, and it doesn't look like we're going home any time soon. What happened with Benjamin seemed to start with a case of constipation just before Halloween. This was probably the cause of his anal fissures which got infected. The poor bugger was in so much pain that he couldn't sit down or poo or pee or have his diaper changed without screaming bloody murder. He was eventually put on morphine so that he could at least sleep relatively comfortably. As soon as Ben's neutraphils started coming in, they were being sent to his bum to fight the infection and two abcesses formed on his anus. These burst last week and Benjamin is much happier. He is still afraid to sit down from standing because I'm sure he remembers the pain, but for all intents and purposes, he is back to normal. He even eagerly lifts his legs for all the various doctors who come to shine flashlights and poke at his butt-hole (ugh!).

As I mentioned, it is taking some time for Benjamin`s counts to come up. In a way we aren't surprised. Another child on the exact same protocol as Ben (who left yesterday for the last time - Yay!) took longer to recover from the 4th course of chemo than all the others, 8 weeks compared to the usual 4 weeks. She is considerably older than Benjamin, so we were hoping that Ben's age would help him bounce back faster. But his butt infection probably didn't help, and with every passing day it looks more and more like we will be spending Christmas here on 8D. And that's OK, because in the grand scheme of things, where we spend X-mas is insignificant as long as we get more X-mases together.

Another family is in the process of finding out that this holiday season will probably be the last for their child, barring a miracle. They are to get more answers today, but they are not optimistic, especially since this battle has dragged on for over a year with surgeries and chemo and a short-lived remission. Compared to this, we are so lucky that "all" Benjamin has is AML, with a detailed and proven protocol and relatively high cure rates.

So that's all the news from 8D. I promise to write again soon, now that we're all caught up.