Thursday, October 11, 2007

Brendon is still at the Barbara Bush Children's Hospital. His pain is much better, but it's still being controlled by medicine. Yesterday they decided to hook Brendon up to a PCA device. Basically it gives him a constant dose of medicine (fentanyl) without him having to ring for a nurse. He can also push a button to get a little boost of medicine if he starts to feel like the pain is getting bad. We all thought (including the nurses who have been taking care of him) that Brendon was trying too hard to be tough and not saying anything until the pain was pretty bad. With the PCA he won't have to worry about bothering anyone. He is hoping to start decreasing the dosage tonight or tomorrow morning to see how he feels. Once he feels like his mouth pain can be taken care of with oral meds we will be able to go home. He's been pretty sleepy because of the medicine. Today he ate chips with his lunch and didn't have any issues... He's still waiting on the pickles. He's nervous to try them until he knows his mouth is a lot better.

We still haven't met with Dr. Hand, but we were told that the samples came back fine. His sodium, calcium and magnesium all looked normal. They think that maybe Bren's shakiness and fast heart rate might have been caused by dehydration. Because of his mouth, throat and low sodium he hasn't been drinking that much. He's never been a really big drinker and he was still drinking, so we were not too concerned about dehydration until they mentioned it to us. They are going to try to get his pain taken care of and then take some more samples. His sodium level has been good for the past few days. They are going to do more tests later on to see what's going on.

Brendon received his last dose of chemotherapy for this round yesterday. Today is his last day on the steroids.. YEAH! He will start the next phase on 10/18. This phase is the last one until maintenance. It will last for 5 weeks and it will not be as intense as this last round was. This one was probably one of the worst for him. We are thankful that it's behind us now.

Brendon's hair is falling out. He has never really had his hair fall out and leave bald spots until this round. His hair always thinned out on the sides and looked like someone had shaved lines into the sides. This time he has bald spots on top of his head and his pillow is covered with little hairs. He gets itchy so we have to change his shirt a lot. I don't have my hair cutting tools here, so I can't shave it until we get home.. I'll post pictures when we get home.

That's about it. We'll update as soon as we have more to report on.. Thanks for the prayers!

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