Progress has been slow on the bacterial infection, but we’ll take any forward progress.
Yesterday fevers were in check early in the day and then really started creeping up in the afternoon. Prior to the afternoon and nighttime doses of Tylenol the fever got above 102.5.
This morning he was switched to Tylenol only with a temperature above 100.5 rather than automatically every 6 hours. He was able to hold out from about 4:30am to about 2:00pm without a fever before creeping above 101. We’ll expect a nighttime fever mostly just because of the body’s additional natural elevated temperatures due to circadian rhythm.
A couple days ago we started to notice some red spots that almost looked like bug bites popping up on his body. At first it seemed like nothing and then yesterday there was some talk of this being some sort of fungus. Blood and urine samples were submitted for that yesterday. No results are back yet, but I also spoke to ID (Infectious Disease) and their working theory is that this is still all tied to the bacterial infection.
From what I gathered some early returning neutrophils and monocytes could be arriving at infection sites and causing localized inflammation that manifests as spots. Fever also amplifies the visibility of the spots. We have seen that some of the spots that were first prominent are now starting to fade though some new spots are popping up today. As ID said, “we’ll keep testing for other things, but everything is currently pointing only to the known Strep mitis infection.”
No blood cultures have grown for the last few days. Samples for blood cultures have been taken every day until today; they are moving to every other day while fevers continue.
Noah was able to get Physical Therapy sessions in the last two days even though they were pretty limited. He’s lost some strength and flexibility very quickly, but that’s pretty much expected. We’ll start to ramp activities gradually, but it’s great to see him just sitting on the couch playing Minecraft with his brother as opposed to uncomfortably laying in bed with a headache and dizziness.
I mentioned last post that maybe platelets and hemoglobin could be stabilizing but I’d need to see a few days of labs. Platelets dropped from 30 to 14 that day and he had to have another transfusion yesterday morning. He did get a bump all the way up to 81 from that which may suggest holding on to them just a little bit better. Hemoglobin also dropped from 8.2 to 7.4 in that day’s labs, but were showing 7.9 in this morning’s labs. There’s also some hints of some monocytes and neutrophils, but still a white blood count so low it’s hard to read too much into anything.
At any rate, today seems better than yesterday, yesterday better than the day before, etc. Let’s keep up that trend. We love you all and over and out.