February 18, 2025
Good morning! Oliver is still sleeping as he has recently taken to waking up at 2:00 am and trying to play or read books for a couple hours. 🤦🏻♀️
He had a good day yesterday! His counts are still going down, but he was still allowed to leave his room and walk around. I filled his wagon with snacks and he made everyone’s day by delivering food to them. A note on the counts— his counts (white counts/neutrophils) should continue to drop and may reach 0 at some point. This is what chemo is supposed to do.. it should be killing the leukemia, but it will also kill his good blood cells and immune system along with the cancer. That’s why it’s so important to keep him away from germs during this time— his body just doesn’t have the white blood cells to fight infection. Unfortunately, the hospital rule is that if his counts are under 500 he can’t leave his room and they were 500 yesterday, so I have a feeling we will be confined to our room soon.
Speaking of sickness, last night Maddie tested positive for the flu so the rest of us will start on tamiflu prophylactically. Please pray that no one else gets the flu!
I spoke to our doctor yesterday and he said the only thing keeping us in the hospital is our insurance. They won’t approve outpatient oral chemo for kids under 18. Our doctor is submitting a letter to the insurance company, but he said they won’t even likely receive it until Wednesday or Thursday.. and we don’t know if they will approve it. Very frustrating to be stuck in the hospital because of insurance reasons— especially when it is so much cheaper for them to send us home! If you have any connections to anyone who you think could help at BlueCrossBlueShield NC, would you let us know? He said sometimes connections can help expedite this process.
I will update the prayer requests page also, but please pray for:
No one else in our family or extended family to get the flu.
We would get Oliver’s nights resolved so we can all get more rest.
Insurance to quickly approve outpatient chemo for Oliver.
Thank you, as always, for your kindness, prayers and support!