Well, I finally finished my own anti-biotics so I got to come to the hospital.  Which is good, because I think my mom’s really at her wits-end…

Let’s see:  Good news:  Her counts are up, actually well enough to go home

Bad news:  She looks really, really bad, guys.  I mean really bad.  This is the first time I’ve seen her through all of this where she’s looked majorly ill.  She doesn’t GET to leave because of this.  They can’t figure out what’s wrong.  She started running a high grade fever again Thursday evening and they started giving her even more anti-biotics and anti-fungals.  She had a chest x-ray and that looked fine.  But she’s broken out ALL over; she pretty much looks like a person who took a bath in grape juice:  Angry splotches everywhere.  Her face is purple red and she’s starting to get raised red/purplish bumps on her head.  She keeps having these vicious rigors that have her screaming in pain.  For those who know her, you know this is bad.  She’s been such a trooper through this, gritting through the worst, so for her to be expressing pain is major.  They’ve started a pain med for that and it seems to be helping a little.  But we still can’t get the fever to stay down.  It hit a high of 105.9 last night and worried all of us.  She’s not able to hold down food (though as I write this she’s been successfully holding down 1/2 cup of noodle soup for about 20 minutes, which is the first food she’s been able to hold down in 4 days, so keeping our fingers crossed) and she throws up as much medicine as she’s able to keep down.

Their current best guess is she’s developed an allergy to penicillian.  So they took her off all penicillian based meds yesterday and are trying to flush them from her system. But if she’s still got the full-body rash and fever tomorrow, they’ll do a full-body CT tomorrow to try to figure out if there’s an abscess or other foreign thing that her body is fighting against.  If not, they’ll look at taking out her port.  But that’s the best guesses they have right now.  And they readily admit that they’re guessing: aka, they really have no idea what’s going on with her body.  She’s developed an allergy to tape and band-aids, she’s all bruised from the shots they keep giving her… she’s just looking really bad, guys.

Please pray.  We love you all…