After spending 3 hours in the Day Hospital getting blood counts run (standard procedure for leukemia), an infusion of Ara C (chemo - part of his Total17 treatment schedule), and a blood transfusion,  Sam got admitted tonight. He’s doing ok and is in good spirits, but isn’t happy about being admitted (who is?). It’s another “out of an abundance of caution” admission which I think is the most appropriate call given he’s in the most challenging phase of treatment: induction.

To give you snapshot: After puking his guts out (only the 2nd time for him to puke - -but when he pukes, he PUKES — this is true when he has a GI bug too so I’m not surprised), he is playing Civ, which his dad introduced him to on Wednesday.  He even was looking at at YouTube video to get some coaching and said “I’m winning now so it is fine.”  

He got admitted so they can observe him for (and it may turn out that none of these are “at play” — it may just be “one of those things” that happens during induction: it’s jarring,  but in the end, ok.  And in the “big scheme of things,” the good news is he’s been home for 15 days straight (and many patients spend all of the 43 days of induction in the hospital):

1) transfusion reaction:: he’d received a pint of blood as a result of having low hemoglobin.  Low hemoglobin is a natural result of having your bone marrow blasted with chemo therapies. Most of the signs *do not* point to this as a problem because he only had 1 of the symptoms that indicate an allergic reaction.

2) PVCs - -premature ventricular contractions which were intermittent, in his case, and  *might* be  the result of his port tube moving a bit (it leads from the port in his chest to his vena cava; the chemo goes into that largest of veins so as to intermingle the chemo with the largest amount of blood volume possible). They will do a chest X-ray to figure out if this happened and it’s a relatively “simple fix” but does involve re-opening his port incision to move the tube (ps. He had these when he was little and he saw a pediatric cardiologist adn wore a Halter monitor so it may just be something that “pops up” for him periodically. The cardiologist said it was ok back then).

3) his electrolytes: which isn’t too surprising given his last 2 weeks (which I haven’t posted about but he was also admitted on 7/12 for low sodium).  This is an easy fix: administer more electrolytes.

Our Outpatient/Clinic nurse practioner (who is great) said this admission will probably be just 24 hours.

And after getting transported to the Heme/Onc floor by Levi (he’s our regular transport man — we’ve been getting to know more about him as we traverse the halls of LPCH :), we met Nurse John and Dr. Lau (resident), who will be overseeing his care tonight, and they also think he’ll be discharged tomorrow (morning, probably).

And, as it turns out, the spirits of the ancestors continue to hold us in their watchful gaze and embrace: Nurse John is a 10 year survivor of B Cell ALL. ❤️  He was diagnosed when he was 21.