Slightly

Slightly.

That’s my word for the last two days. Eli’s xrays have been slightly improving the past two mornings. His NG tube has been taking out slightly less “junk” each day. He has been up and walking slightly more. His potassium is stabilizing slightly. His pain seems to be slightly less during the day (although still pretty restless at night) and his overall attitude seems to be slightly better than it was on Tuesday.

However, slightly is good enough to avoid a second surgery for now! Dr. LaQuaglia feels that Eli’s bowels are just very slow to recover from the surgery, but that there probably isn’t a mechanical obstruction again because slowly but surely the air is moving through. We are praying that things continue to go this way so we can avoid a second surgery. You know, for all of the conspiracy theorists that believe that the hospitals are out for every dollar they can get their hands on, Dr. LaQuaglia is one of the most conservative surgeons you’ll meet. We were told today by our social worker that he is often the one in the Neuroblastoma meetings saying, I don’t think we necessarily need to do surgery yet, try these things first to see if we can avoid it. He doesn’t like to cut into a kid unless he feels it is completely necessary. Definitely a quality we like in him.

The low Potassium was a real problem because that is what cause your bowels to contract, so getting that level right was key. They are probably going to put him on TPN (nutrition) tomorrow because he hasn’t eaten anything now in over a week. However, they will wait until after his PET scan, which is first thing in the morning. Again, the PET scan will be used to compare with the MIBG scan to see if the one little spot that has lit up the last two times is active cancer or just dead scar tissue. You know what we will be praying for. 🙂

The other news we received is that Eli is HAMA negative again! The only downside (if there can be a downside here) is that they have decided to continue us on the two week 3F8 with beta glucan. We were really kind of hoping that they would move us to the 1 week on, 3 week off protocol and after four rounds of that, move to 1 week on, 7 weeks off. We challenged it a little bit, but they are quite sure that they want to stay with the 2 weeks on, 3 weeks off protocol for another four rounds (assuming he doesn’t turn HAMA positive) before moving to the 1 week on, 7 weeks off protocol. The biggest reason: It’s working so well for Eli, we don’t want to risk changing things at this point. Once they said that, we stopped discussing it because we don’t want to try to convince them to do the 1 week and then have things go downhill! We are just happy every time the HAMA comes back negative because that means we get at least one more round of 3F8! So the next round of 2 week 3F8 starts July 21st and hopefully we’ll be able to come home after that for 3 weeks or so. Of course, you never know around here what might change that “plan”.

So, we’re obviously praying for some more progress over the next few days so we can get out of this place soon! Thank you for praying. I’d ask that you also keep two other Neuroblastoma boys in your prayers right now. Brody from KS and Kody from MS are both having tough times and scan results aren’t exactly going their way, so please pray for them and their families as well.