Roller Coaster Ride

Monday, September 12, 2011

This morning came the best news ever! It’s…a true miracle, the work of heroes-a whole team of them and the answer to heartfelt prayers of a mother, father, child, siblings, family, friends and strangers.  After just 17 days of waiting, the bone marrow Jericho gave to Jacob is showing its amazing strength and ability to thrive.  It’s working.  Jacob’s ANC is 100 this morning! 

            What does this mean exactly, you may ask? Since Jacob’s cancerous bone marrow is dead (yay...I can say that now without being scared), it is unable to make any type of blood cells… red cells to carry oxygen, platelets to clot his blood and white blood cells for healing and protection. ANC is a type of white blood cell.  The doctors call these “the first line of defense”.  ANC are the little soldiers, the ones standing guard and ready to attack at the first sign of trouble.  Without them, Jacob is susceptible to anything and everything that comes his way.    With these little soldiers showing up in his lab work, well, we know they had to come from Jericho’s marrow!

            The ANC are especially exciting to us because this is the number that Docs use to decide when Jacob is safe to leave his little isolation hospital room where he has been trapped for the past 28 days and go back out into the big wide world of real life again!  When his ANC reaches 500 and is able to stay there for 3 days, they will officially declare that the bone marrow has “grafted”.  This could happen as soon as Thursday.   We have to realize that the counts can fluctuate a little for a few days so we’ll have to be patient, but now that we know the marrow is growing…enough to show up at all, we know that it’s just a matter of time.

            This morning was so happy for me and it was so exciting to tell Jacob.  He was surprised and wasn’t expecting this to happen this soon.  Also, he feels really sick right now so I don’t think he was expecting any good news for the day. He took it all in stride and overall seemed a little proud of himself about it.  I sensed a bit of relief in him knowing he’s still ‘got it’.  He always loves to be the best at everything he does and I could just imagine him thinking to himself, “Ya, I’m gonna graft sooner than most, I even fight cancer a little better than anybody else.”

            I immediately sat down and posted the best announcement on facebook, “It’s working, It’s Working! Jacob’s ANC is 100! The marrow is growing!”  I posted updates on Josh’s wall, on Jacob’s wall, on the “pray for Jacob Watson” wall and on the Cancer Mom’s facebook group.  Then, I got out my phone and texted everyone close to us.  I was so happy, so excited.  We’re almost there!

            What I didn’t realize, and neither did Jacob, is that engraftment would make him sicker before he’d get better.  While his counts are zeroed out, he gets real sick and his insides get all torn up from the chemo damage.  He has to be given IV anti-biotics, anti-viral and anti-fungal medicines just to protect him from potential infections.  Basically, they give him a chemical immune system until he grows a new one.  When that new system "wakes up" it gets straight to work.  As all the different kinds of white cells begin to grow and reproduce they do the only thing they know how to do....defend, protect and destroy!  Well, imagine the worst flu you ever had and then imagine worse than that.  This is what they say it feels like...and that's what it looked like to me.  Once those white blood cells get their job done, he will finally start feeling better. 

            The day moved on and Jacob just kept feeling worse and worse.  He woke up in the morning with a horrible headache. His face was swollen up and he thought his eyes were protruding or something because his face felt weird. He was nauseous all day and the headache only got worse, not better as the day moved on.  He was able to lay in bed and watch TV for a few hours, but just lifting his head up enough to get the remote or take a sip of water made his head hurt worse.  It was a 9 out of 10 on the pain scale for most of the day.  He fell asleep and I stepped out to the laundry room/parent kitchen to make myself a sandwich.  My friend Kelly came in just as I was getting ready to leave and we had a really good visit.  Her son Jonathan is here for transplant and they are just about 2 weeks behind our schedule, so she’s feeling a lot of the same emotions and has the same questions I did the few days before Jacob’s transplant.  It felt so good to be able to offer my support, advice and a little encouragement.  Somehow, helping another makes me feel that what I’m going through and Jacob’s ordeal is not for nothing.

            As I was talking with Kelly, every few minutes I had this heavy feeling in my heart and wanted to go check on Jacob.  I reached for my phone and realized I didn’t have it in my pocket. (he hates when I forget my phone and leave the room…and here’s why)  Finally, the feeling was too much and I told Kelly I had to go check on him.  She felt the same way about Jonathan and went to go check him too.  When I got back to Jacob's room across the hall from the laundry room, he was sitting in bed with eyes half closed looking pale and exhausted.  He had just recovered from a horrible vomiting spell. He didn’t have a bucket nearby (but somehow got it and didn’t make a mess) He had paged the nurse, and they didn’t come. He had called me and then Dad wondering where I had gone and ultimately managed the whole scary episode himself…alone.  I felt sooo bad!

            The whole day was like that, ups and downs…happy that his counts are coming up, sharing the good news with a smile and then looking at him…suffering and me fighting back the tears.  I have to cling to all the ups and stay positive every day.  We'll have him home soon...sooner than we thought we would! So much to be thankful for!