Day 15

Lindsey is improving a tiny bit each day, but is still annoyed by her sour stomache caused by the mucousitis. Her blood counts are fluctuating, and when they go down she gets more tired, and when they're up she's much better. All of this is normal for this time period, and she should continue to improve steadily. A few weeks from now, she'll be her old self again; only it will be her "new" self, since she will have a new immune system! We're having issues with one of the lumens on her catheter. When they accessed it yesterday in the clinic she immediately felt weird and started coughing heavily. They turned it off, did an X-ray to check for a blood clot, and took cultures to check for infection. They didn't find a clot, but the culture results are not in yet. She's got two other lumens so they are using those for IV access and are leaving the questionable one alone. If the cultures come out positive, they will probably yank the entire thing. That can be good and bad at the same time. If they take it out, there's no longer a risk of infection, (we don't want to replicate the issues that we had with the PICC line back in December) but, without a catheter in place, you get needle sticks for direct IV access into a vein. The 'sticks' are the lesser of the two evils, so she'll just have to endure that if her catheter is infected. One day at a time....................