Negative PET!

I’ll try to get everyone up to date with a quick note. We did indeed get moved up to our room on the 9th floor this morning around 9am. Eli was in a LOT of pain today, but only when his Toradol would wear off. It’s an anti inflammatory drug given after surgery that is a non narcotic. It works wonders! However, you can only use it up to 5 days, then you have to stop or else risk some serious side effects. It doesn’t make him loopy or distant like Dilaudid does, it simply takes away the pain and then Eli is his typical joking and fun self. He gets it every 6 hours, but when he is on it, he doesn’t need the morphine, which is great.

He did get to lose his NG tube and his catheter, so his only tube is the wound drain that will stay in for a week. He even was allowed to start eating already, although he wasn’t much in the mood for it today. We took several walks today, but tried not to overdo it. Now we just continue the TPN and antibiotics and pray for improvement and recovery of his wound as well as his bowel functions.

A piece of good news that I have not yet shared with everyone is that Eli’s PET scan results came back negative for active Neuroblastoma! They specifically looked at the area from the MIBG that they had titled “scar tissue” and sure enough, it wasn’t alive or active in the PET. That means we have clean bone marrow biopsies, a clean CT, a clean MIBG, and a clean PET! The bone marrow aspirates aren’t in yet, but those have been negative in the past, so we are really hoping those are also going to remain negative. We are really anxious to get back to the 3F8s though, because we don’t like to give this cancer any chances of building back up strength and striking again. This is an instance where it’s a good thing to “kick them while they’re down”.

So that is the quick version of Eli’s status today. I knew we would have many faithful prayer warriors wanting to know how he was holding up. Thank you all for checking in!