Arrgh!!

Team Miner,

Today started off pretty well for me.  Stella was a happy camper.  Lydia was her typically lovely self.  After dropping them off at school and with our nanny I listened to a great lecture on silence in meditation (funny topic for a lecture, eh?) on a lovely drive. The drive was en route to have brunch with Erika (and Linnea and Karina). Brunch was yummy, having a chance to catch up with Erika was delightful. To add to the self-care moments before I return to work next week I even stopped at Target on my way back. Total guilty pleasure for me.  I also went to Michael's and procured a glue gun to make new hair bows for the Stellameister. [I refrained from hitting any other Colma hot spots - such as Nordstrom Rack (or Sizzler?!) - so my self-control should be noted.] Nevertheless, with all of this, I was running late, and called Jeff.  Oddly, he was asleep and had been sleeping all morning.  And then I got home and found Jeff much more lethargic than usual, and feeling totally awful. I should have known that the awesome morning wouldn't last.

So, almost as soon as I came home and sent Jeff to the shower and made him a weird oatmeal/soy milk smoothie, Jinny and Bob (who have been most fantastic visitors!) took Jeff to the clinic for a regularly scheduled visit.  Turns out his blood counts are lower than ever, which explains the fatigue, and he has spiked a fever high enough to require his... admission to the hospital.

Poor Jeff.  

For back information here, in case some readers are unfamiliar, when a chemo patient is neutropenic (white blood cell counts are very low), their ability to ward off infection of any type is significantly compromised. Since Jeff is neutropenic at the moment due to the last round of chemo, this makes running a fever dangerous. To keep him safe and free of complications, the doctors are pumping him full of antibiotics and antivirals and fluids. They are also culturing his blood etc. to see if they can find the source of what's making him sick.

At the moment, Jeff is not feeling too bad. The fever has already gone down after they gave him some Tylenol. Bob has been keeping him company and Jinny helped me put the girls to sleep. Jeff even has a room to himself on the 13th floor. But of course, no matter how you slice it, this is crappy. So send Jeff's immune system some energy and vim and vigor. Allegedly he can come home when his blood counts improve or the fever resolves.  I will keep you all posted when we know more about what's going on. 

Now I'm off to shower and eat and attempt to sleep before one child or the other wakes me up.

Katina