Early Sunday morning (2:30 am or so), Sam woke up vomiting. And as we’ve talked about before, Sam is a super vomit machine when he vomits.  He lived up to his billing on Saturday night too but thankfully made it to the bathroom. He’s not taking any chemo medicine right now so we were concerned about a GI bug. This was his first time to show signs of illness beyond leukemia and we’ve been sufficiently prepped to beware of illness because his body a) doesn’t have the ability to show signs of infection beyond fever and b) sepsis is a real concern.  

Fever above 100 gets him a do not pass go, go straight to the Emergency Room ticket but where does vomit fit in on this continuum of symptoms, you ask?  Me too. So I called the on-call oncologist at 2:50 am. 

He didn’t have any other symptoms: no fever, no diarrhea (you know how much teenagers *love* to talk about poop — we talk about a lot more things now than we used to — but I still get the “Mooooooommm” and the obligatory eye roll. 🙄. #teensgottateen). 

So we were advised just to monitor.  Turns out 1 vomit episode is ok. 2 vomit episodes = Emergency Room visit.  1 vomit episode plus fever = ER visit. 1 vomit + diarrhea = ER.  So now you are up to speed on the vomit continuum. Aren’t you glad you read this post?  

So I gave him a Zofran (anti-nausea medication) and he went to sleep and slept until 10:30 am which is late for him.

No more additional symptoms on Sunday or Monday and Zofran continued to help the nausea so we got to stay home — yay!