Iowa City Bound

Iowa City Bound, the Incredible Journey.

Just when we were getting settled back in at home, we have to get ourselves back to Iowa City. However, if you’re thinking a fever must have hit, you’d actually be mistaken. Despite our best attempts (pretty much all credit for hard work going to Lacey), Eli just has not been eating or drinking well at all the past week. He hasn’t been on nutrition since Tuesday the 30th, so we were getting worried about his weight loss. He’s down to 35 pounds after being 41 in New York.

The real kicker, however, that made us pack up and get to Iowa City is that the blood in the urine returned, but worse than before. They ran some tests and confirmed that the blood content is pretty high. The plan is to give him LOTS of fluid and try to have him flush out his bladder. They are also expecting to give him some nutrition and lipids via IV as well since he hasn’t been doing well at eating or drinking.

Eli’s latest excuse for not eating is that he has a few mouth sores, so it hurts to eat. However, he won’t even eat things like ice cream or popsicles, so I think his lack of taste plays a big role. If we are able to finally get something in him, it usually all comes up later when we give him his nightly oral meds. It’s quite frustrating, but I know it is for him as well since he hates to throw up. ESPECIALLY when it means he has to take his meds again since they didn’t stay down.

He did get a blood transfusion yesterday because his counts were declining and he was acting really tired and sluggish. He’s officially neutropenic and the neupogen shots have been going since Tuesday. We’re not sure how long we’ll be in Iowa City, but it will certainly be through the weekend.

One nice thing about being back in Iowa City is reconnecting with our home town nurses that we haven’t seen for weeks and weeks! We really didn’t have to fill them in much on what happened in New York since they kept tabs on Eli through his CarePage, but it was nice to see some of Eli’s Hawkeye buddies (I wish a few of them were Kansas State fans, then we’d be in heaven). I think there was even a bit of a throw down among the nurses over who got to take care of Eli his first night back in Iowa City. Congratulations to our winner, Laurie, who won a night full of glares and comments like, “What is she doing to me, Dad?” 🙂

Hopefully this will give us the opportunity to talk to the Iowa City Drs. about what the plan should be going forward and how New York will play into that. Prayer for that conversation would be appreciated. Also, prayer for Eli’s recovery from this last high dose of chemo is of course appreciated as well.

I didn’t get a chance to link up our good photos of our favorite past time in NYC, hanging out with the Zobians from Candlelighters NYC, so I’ll just include them here!