Back in hospital

For better or worse, depending on your view point, Joshua's bloods were good enough on Thursday for him to be admitted to hospital again for his next round of chemo. He spent all day on Thursday as an outpatient getting his pre chemo drug, Rituximab. It was made a little more bearable by family members coming in and out. We had to juggle it a bit, as there wasn't a lot of space and it wouldn't really have worked to have had 10 people standing at the end of Joshua's bed all day. 

At 7pm we got transferred up to the ward and Rituximab was followed by 3 hours of Methotrexate and the usual fluids. The good news is that we have a single room overlooking the river, ready for 'RiverFire' on Saturday night, clearly a priority!  Riverfire is Queensland’s ultimate fireworks display, with more than 20 minutes of fireworks. There will also be aerobatics from the Australian Defence Force.

During the time Joshua is out of the hospital, I forget how horrible the nights are in hospital - but it comes back quickly! The nights are very broken as Joshua has obs taken every few hours, he is given various medications, bloods are taken, fluids changed and the machines are constantly beeping about something - air in the line, pressure in the line, transfusion finished, transfusion nearly finished. Every time the machine beeps, the nurse has to be called in to sort it out. There are also a lot of flashing flights, so Daniel, Joshua and I all use eye masks. (Thanks to those long haul flights, we all have them).

This morning, Joshua had barely woken up when he was told they were ready for him in theatre. He has two lumbar punctures per cycle under general anaesthetic to inject chemo into his spine. Usually he wakes up really fast, but today, he really didn't want to wake up and was very sleepy. Not sure what was going on today as they seemed to be having the same problem with other patients and the recovery room completely filled up. They had to stop the list to allow time for the patients to wake up! Eventually, when his blood pressure was high enough, we were allowed back up to the ward. Joshua was pretty wiped and spent most of the day sleeping. He now has five days of a chemo drug called Cytarabine, run continually; one more lumbar puncture, then hopefully he can go home to recover. Cytarabine is a new drug for him this cycle, so please pray against side effects. All the drugs come with pages of details of possible side effects, which I mostly don't read. The nurse said this one often makes people feel like they have flu. 

Sadly, some of Daniel's family had to leave yesterday evening, but tomorrow we look forward to Daniel's parents and aunt arriving and watching RiverFire in the evening. Hopefully we don't have to change rooms!