A turn for the worse

We thought Mina Brigitta had turned a corner yesterday, but it seems to have been for the worse. She pretty much slept all day today. She continues to have fevers, although she hasn't seemed quite as uncomfortable as the last few days, and she's not throwing up as much. She did actually sleep straight through the night for the first time in a while, which allowed me to catch up a bit on my own sleep. But she just hasn't had any energy at all today, which is kind of getting us down after we were so hopeful yesterday.

The doctors are still baffled, so they tried to schedule another CT scan today. She couldn't eat or drink anything all day because they would have to sedate her to make her hold still for the scan. Unfortunately, one of the two machines was down today, and they had trouble scheduling either an anesthesiologist or a nurse that could administer a lighter sedative, and they told us at 7 pm they were giving up for the day. So I was finally able to give her a few drinks of juice, and a few minutes later the resident came in and said they could take her in 10 minutes. Of course she couldn't go because of the juice I'd given her. Grrr! They talked about it for awhile outside the room, and I think what happened is nurse Amber shamed them into scheduling it for tonight at 1 am. So another tough night for Dad, but it'll be worth it not to have to go through this again tomorrow, and to have the scan results first thing in the morning.

What we're hoping is that the scan shows no change in her lungs , or maybe even an improvement, since her last scan on Friday. If they don't find anything at all, it may indicate that she has a virus, which her recovering white cells would hopefully be able to clear in a matter of days, or perhaps that the medications themselves are causing the fevers. If they do find a locus of infection, they would probably have to take a sample of it, wherever it is, to find out why it' s not responding to the drugs she's already on and, hopefully, to find a drug that it does respond to.

We did get a bit of good news today. Dr. Loh called to say they found a donor with a 6/6 HLA match who can be ready by March 17 (For more information about HLA typing, look here http://www.bmtnews.org/bmt/bmt.book/chapter.4.html#p34). She's coming by to meet with us tomorrow so I'll post more then, but it's great news that there's a matched donor out there, and that he (it's a man!) can be ready so quickly.