Sophie's World

2:30 PM: Sophie's having a good day here in the hospital. It took her forever to go to sleep last night with me in the room. But once she was out for good, she slept well--we both did.

I have more information from the doctor this morning. It turns out that the preliminary identification of the bacteria that they did on Saturday was wrong, which is actually good news, because it means that this is a completely different infection than what she had before. The other infection was a "gram positive cocci" and this one is a "gram negative rod" which is generally a type of intestinal infection. Because this is completely unrelated to her previous infection, we don't need to think about taking out or replacing her line.

The other good news is that the antibiotic they gave in at the ER (rocephin) works well against the type of infection she has, so it looks like we might be able to treat Saturday as "day 1" instead of starting from Sunday night, which means the course of antibiotics will be shorter from here. They have her on rocephin (also called ceftriaxone) and gentamycin. We're waiting on a few more pieces of information at this point. First, we're waiting to see whether the blood culture they took last night grows anything (it hadn't as of a few hours ago). If it doesn't then that's a good sign that the rocephin started working on Saturday; if it does grow something, then that might change the course of treatment. Second, we're waiting on the specific identification of the bacteria. They know what general class it is, but the formal diagnosis of the specific type hasn't come in. The antibiotics they have her on now might need to be changed depending on what she has. Third, we're waiting on the sensitivities. They "treat" the bacteria that was growing in her blood from Saturday's positive culture to see what types of medications (and at what levels) it reacts to. Obviously they're treating her at the same time, but if the tests show the bacteria is more sensitive to some other type of medication, they'll switch her to that. Once all that is narrowed down, they'll get her to a stabilized set and dosage of antibiotics and we'll continue to administer them at home. He said it's quite likely we can get her down to a once-a-day dose of IV antibiotics (it was three time a last time we came home). He thinks the earliest we would go home is Wednesday night.

She's had a couple of fevers, but they don't seem worried about that. Her ANC has dropped from 6.4 on Saturday morning to 1.6 this morning. That's still fairly high (she doesn't need to wear a mask or anything), but dropping that quickly probably means she'll be neutropenic (at risk of other infections) before too long. We'll enjoy our freedom while we can. If she ever wakes up from her nap, I'll take her to the playroom upstairs.

Randall is on his way in and will stay with her tonight, and I'll come back tomorrow. He had a trip planned to see a speaker in Washington DC tomorrow night and spend the night, so we're trying to get things lined up so he can still do that. I'm eager to spend some time with Elisabeth tonight. It will be nice when Sophie's home and we can all be together at the same time.