Saturday, August 4, 2007

Here is Katlyn having a visit with a therapeutic dog. They have come to visit her twice now and she just loves it.
Our little monkey.
This is Katlyn wearing Mrs. Potato Head's earring as her own. I was in hysterics.

Katlyn is doing very well. Some of her research blood is starting to come back now. So far things are looking good. Her ada activity is still about the same which is great. Her neautrophils were down a bit as of Friday, to 499, and her lymphocytes 83, but we know she's going to go right back up. As most of you would know from following Katlyn's progress, she does bounce back and forth. Each time she goes higher and drops less and less. So overall it's looking great and Katlyn's numbers are going up.

I had a talk with one of Katlyn's doctors about her t-cell proliferation, and he said he has a theory as to why he thinks it went from 7,000 to 600. He said that Katlyn's toxic metabolites had increased just before that blood was taken, so he thinks that maybe those cells were sick and not able to function properly. He said it takes the cells about two weeks to die off, so we may get some good news this week. Katlyn's toxic metabolites are back down and as a result, if her doctor's theory is correct, her t-cell proliferation should be up. Here's hoping.
She is doing fantastic though. On Tuesday the doctors and some of the nurses were trying to convince us to remove the reverse isolation precautions. We thought about it all day long and hard a hard time with that one. We had both come to the same conclusion that we were okay with not gowning ourselves, but didn't really trust anyone else enough to remove the isolation precautions. Basically we were told that it would be really hard to enforce something like that if we weren't practicing it ourselves, so we decided that the gowns will stay. We are just way too uncomfortable with it. One reason being that we feel Katlyn isn't to that safe point yet.
We have had pretty hectic week. Sometimes it seems as though it just never ends. For starters, John found out that he has lost his job. So that was kind of a blow and besides that we have been so busy between the hospital and the Children's Inn doing a lot of work. I'm going to leave it at that because I don't want to discuss it, but I also don't want to forget it.