Holding him close

Today Keian woke up sick. Not cold sick, he just seemed off. He vomited twice in the morning and barely ate for the entire day, but insisted he was well enough to go to visit Grandma and Grandpa. After a couple of phone calls from my Mom, we soon realized it was a little more than just chemo related sickness. He was dropped back at home just after dinner and within 20 minutes, his fever had sky rocketed up to 38.6c. When a child has cancer and is undergoing chemo, having a fever is not a good thing - it could indicate internal infection, sepsis (infection in the blood), or a flu. Neither of these are good, but the flu is the lesser of the evils. As chemo patients are immuno-comprimised, they are more suseptable to viral and bacterial infections - some of which are quite serious. I'm sitting at Children's Hospital at this very minute waiting for antibiotics to enter his bloodstream. Apparently, they won't have bacterial cultures back until Monday morning, so they are giving us a 24 hour dose by IV and sending us home. There's not a lot we can do until we have the results. Some news we were definately not expecting to hear tonight from the Doctor - they detected a heart murmur. What?!?! She says it could be a murmur that was undetected,could be benign (won't cause any problems), or it could possibly be damage done to his heart from the chemo. Yet another thing to add to his little fighting body. We will be able to discuss the heart and the blood results Monday morning with his Oncologist, but until then we wait. Keian just fell asleep - he's so exhausted - atleast we have a room in Emergency. Joren is spending the night over at my Mom's, as we'll be getting home during the middle of the night. I plan on having Keian snuggled right into me tonight. I don't think I've ever appreciated my little boy more than I have this last couple of months. He is my hero. ~Chantal