June 9, 2009

Bryce had a very restless night last night; therefore, so did Kendra who stayed with him during the night. For me today he slept quite a bit. He continues to retain a lot of fluids and unfortunately they were unable to pull off any fluids when he had dialysis this evening because his blood pressure kept dropping. Typically Bryce receives about three hours of dialysis, but they were only able to give him two hours of dialysis.

Today Bryce did have the CT scan using the IV contrast and he also had a liver biopsy done. We are anxious to get the results of these two procedures. We should get the results of the CT scan tomorrow, but the biopsies may be up to three days for the pathologists to get us the results. Bryce seemed to have tolerated both procedures quite well.

He is having a fair amount of confusion again - probably due to multiple reasons as before. In the past the dialysis really helped with this. They plan to do dialysis again tomorrow.

Bryce's temperature today was either normal or slightly elevated, which is good. We were told wrong yesterday about his white blood count - it was actually 26,000 instead of 22,000. Today it was 22,000. We are concerned that his bilirubin has now gone into the 26 range - the highest that it has been.

We were able to have some short interactions with Bryce throughout the day, which is special for us. I continue to feel that it is a great privilege to help him by adjusting his position in bed, adjusting pillows, cleaning him, helping him in the bathroom, etc. Today I commended him for our polite he always is in saying "please" and "thank you". He looked at me and asked "what else am I supposed to do?" I replied, "just keep doing what you are doing."

We continue to take one day at a time and your support makes a huge difference in helping us to handle this adversity. In all of this we feel so greatly blessed and know that the Lord loves us.

(P.S. If you are interested we added a link in the blog of an article I wrote that was published in the Church News on the five-year anniversary of Bryce's third kidney transplant: http://www.prayforbryce.com/