Short version: All is generally fine, and Sam's fever seems to be under control, but the team doesn't really know what caused it, and so we'll be here a few more days at least -- I think Wednesday or so.

Longer version: transient fevers aren't uncommon after an endoscopy, but Sam's spiked to 102/103 over about 40 hours, and that's pretty high to be just a reaction to the procedure. In general, post stem cell transplant, the team takes fevers pretty seriously, because they can indicate infections that the new immune system just isn't yet equipped to deal with, and they can spin out of control quickly.

So they'd like to understand what the root cause is in order to treat it properly; and failing that, they'd like to believe that any course of treatment (like antibiotics) is actually treating the underlying problem.

Sam didn't have a fever when he went to bed last night, and although it creeped up, it didn't really become a fever until (briefly) at 4a this morning, when they gave him some Tylenol and it subsided. He hasn't taken Tylenol since, and it's been staying down under 100, which is great! It more or less corresponds with when he started a new antibiotic (Flagyl -- these companies are really, really not great at marketing & naming), so maybe that's treating something, but we don't totally know! 

The plan from now is to see if we can get to 24 hours without fever (afebrile!) -- if that happens, we may take him off the Flagyl to see if fever comes back -- then at least we would know that it's treating the underlying cause. If the fever comes back tonight, then we'll suspect that we aren't treating the cause, and they'll schedule a CT scan to see if they can see any infection hiding out.

Mostly I think they just would like to see Sam be able to go fever free and eat a little more regularly before they send him home.

Anyone care to guess how Sam feels about this? 3 guesses and the first 2 don't count. He's annoyed. Wants to get home. Every morning he says "just give me a few minutes with the doc. I'll persuade them." He's not wrong. He's a gigantic PITA to argue with, no lie. ("No cap," as he says. Also, this is all karma - Mom used to like saying that she never was able to win an argument with me after I turned 5. It's honestly taken me a fairly long time in life to understand that that was not particularly a compliment. Anyhoo.)

So I suspect we'll be at the hospital for a few more relatively uneventful days of increasing annoyance and boredom.

I'll take it.