198 days in the hospital and we finally get a little bit of good news! Chris’s prealbumin is finally coming up. Blood work shows it is up 18! This is a great feat considering we’ve been trying to get this number above 15 for over a year. The prealbumin determines how well he will heal, so it’s a very important number. Now that it’s finally above 15 we can hopefully get the surgeons to at least go in and wash out some of the infection off his brain. I know that sounds like a small task but it’s really not. They have to cut incisions on both sides, remove the hardware, flush out the infection and them close up the areas he has skin to close. Eventually he will have a total scalp skin graph but for now washing out the infection will be a great help.
The second piece of good news is one of those blessings in disguise. The chemo and radiation has wrecked havoc on his teeth. Sometime time last night/ early morning Chris lost a jaw tooth. We’re assuming he swallowed it. The blood from losing the tooth has been draining down into his lungs. Due to the blood that’s coming out of the trach suction the pulmonologist had an x-ray done. They wanted to make sure the blood wasn’t pooling in his lungs. At the time they did the x-ray no one had noticed he had lost a tooth. That wasn’t discovered until I got here this morning. Anyway, they did the chest x-ray and when the pulmonologist got the results back she was so excited she came right in to his room to tell me. His chest x-ray looks better than it has in months!
These may seem like little improvements but after this long in the hospital even the little improvements are exciting, a blessing, a ray of hope!
Keep him in your thoughts and prayers
-Lori Hulett