Brendon is now off the PCA device and is seeing how the oral pain medicine does with managing his pain. So far it has been manageable. He is on 2 different types of pain medicines. They were talking about discharging us this afternoon or this evening, but then they took Bren's temperature and he had a fever of 100.6. So they waited a couple of hours and took it again. Still 100.6. We have been walking around and trying to keep things cool to get the temp to go down. No luck so far. Last check was about an hour ago and it was 100.9. They are not sure what's causing the fever.. His heart pretty rate is also pretty fast. His counts for this morning were low (white blood count is only 1.0), so they think he might be fighting something. So it's another night at the hospital, which is fine with us. We'd rather be safe than sorry.. The good thing is that Bren is not hooked up to any iv's so he doesn't have to push his big pole around wherever he goes. The sores in his mouth are getting better, but his tongue and the corners of his mouth are still pretty icky (technical term..). We are hoping that he'll feel much better tomorrow so that we can all go home.. We'll see.

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!

Brendon went to see the kidney doctor, Dr. Hand, yesterday afternoon. He had to give a blood and urine sample to have further testing done. We are hoping to have the results later on this afternoon. After seeing Dr. Hand, we went to the clinic to be checked out. Bren's mouth has been hurting him so bad and the pain medicine we have is not helping him. The clinic gave Bren the choice of trying to up the home pain meds to see if that helped or being admitted and being put on morphine. His pain was bad enough that he decided to go to the hospital. He was admitted to Barbara Bush last night and was put on Benadryl and Morphine. He says that his mouth is feeling much better since he's been on the morphine. He was starting to question his decision to be admitted last night, but now he's glad he chose to be here. They can monitor his pain much better than we can at home. We are not sure how long we'll be here yet. The doctors/nurses think that he's on the tail end of the mouth sores, so hopefully it will feel better soon. Brendon's spirits are good today. He's a little sleepy, but he's in a lot less pain.

I'll update as soon as more we have more information....