Mr. Cheeks Goes to the Hospital: Eight weeks

Friday, August 17, 2012

Eight weeks

Alan's white count is up to 35,000! The shot of Neulasta he got last week stays in the system for several weeks so it is still having an effect in boosting his white counts. Today is Friday, the start of yet another week, which means it's time for dressing changes. We will change the two nephrostomy tubes, the G-tube, and PICC line, but we will take the port needle out rather than replacing it and changing the dressing since we will be removing it Monday.

Holly, Doc HJ's PA, came to discuss Monday's surgery. We are scheduled first thing in the morning to remove the port and put in a percutaneous subclavian line (rather than the Broviac Catheter so it can be removed more easily). The surgeon doing the procedure didn't think that replacing the PICC would do very much but the Attending wanted Alan to have all fresh lines (apparently replacing the PICC line is a standard procedure in transplant patients).

It was another day of hard work with the OT and PT. Today Alan walked out the door to the wheelchair a few feet into the hallway. Then it was time to go down to Rehabilitation with the OT to sit in the chair again and work on numbers. He was a little annoyed that the Scrabble tiles didn't have a full range of numbers and the card game only went up to 12.

Miss Sheila from Child Life brought Cora, a doll for demonstrating medical play, and Alan took care of her. He actually wore the stethoscope and "listened" to Cora, pronouncing her "Perfect!". We were talking with Miss Sheila about Alan's OT session and it turned out she had a bag of orphaned Scrabble tiles that we could use for numbers - all the way up to 98! He had a blast once Daddy grabbed a Sharpie and numbered the blank side of the tiles.

We took a long walk over the sky-bridge, picking up a box of popcorn for Alan from the Fountain first. We wandered around the Mays Clinic some more, this time checking out a section we hadn't explored before. There was nice hospitality center for patients and caretakers, a museum exhibit about the history of MDA and a very fun-looking Child Visitation center.