Update 3/19/09

Today was a much more quiet day than yesterday (whew). Beckham had labs in the morning that showed that his platelets had dropped to 2, which was expected with his blood loss when he got his PICC line and all of his blood draws. His hemoglobin had also dropped and it dropped low enough that he would require a transfusion. The thought was that he would get a platelet and blood transfusion at the same time, but the lab was having quite a hard time finding perfect cross-matched platelets. The doctors want to be extra, extra careful with anything foreign that goes in Beck's body and have been very careful with the donated blood and platelets. He will not receive the platelet transfusion until tomorrow, but he did receive blood. I can't tell you the color difference it makes it Beckham's appearance when he gets blood. It really is night and day.

One interesting thing that happened today is that Beckham's swollen neck lymph node decided to shrink some. It is still abnormally large, but much smaller and softer than it was yesterday. Very strange. The hem/onc and cardiology doctor seemed a little encourage by this news, but also confused, because this kid is such a mystery.

I stole this picture off of my sister in law's blog. Thanks Haley for coming and staying with us last week. I know that Gwen misses her "not Gwamma-Haywee."

Beck's D-dimer (a test to check for the presence of blood clots in a body) came back positive today. This means that somewhere in Beck's body is a blood clot (which we already knew from when he got his PICC line a month ago) or multiple blood clots. It's pretty strange that Beck could have blood clots when his blood is almost platelet free, but it also could mean that Beck's clots are responsible for the loss of platelets because clots basically eat platelets. A ultra sound was done on both of his arms and legs and it came back as normal - no clots. The doctors are now talking about doing tests (CT and/or MRI) on the rest of his body to check for other clots.

Beck's hem/onc doctor did tell me that he was going to put in a call to one of the best hem/onc doctors in the world, to see if has any sort of insight on what could be going on inside our little guy's body. How crazy is that?

As for now, we will continue with the steroid treatment and then the platelet treatment tomorrow. We will continue to keep you posted on anything. Thank you so much for all of your kind words from the last post, and thank you for agreeing that it would be a great idea to have a "screaming room" in a hospital. I'm sure that there are many out there who would benefit from this! Keep the prayers coming. They mean so much to our family.