Home Again

As of about 7pm last night, Daniel is back home again & doing well.  His fever is very low-grade or non-existent at this point and we're ALL quite happy to be done with the hospital ... at least as an in-patient ... at least for now (sigh).

His white cell counts are actually back into the normal range, though red counts remain low and platelets have just gone nuts.  But we're assured it's all "fine". 

After spending Thurs, Fri, & Sat night and most of the days on Sat & Sun, I'm feeling pretty exhausted.  Losing an hour for SDST (that's Stupid Daylight Savings Time) hasn't helped as I could barely drag myself out of bed anyway!  So keeping up with work and my Bible study has been a bit more of a challenge this week and I'm feeling it.  But we were EXTREMELY blessed by a good friend coming by to spend Sunday night with Daniel at the hospital so that we could both have a night off.  Andrea was originally planning to come stay the night, but was absolutely dreading it as she was not feeling well anyway and has enough trouble sleeping without trying to do so on the hospital's pull-out chair and being awakened every 32 seconds by the nursing staff through the night ... OK, that was a slight exaggeration ... but not much!!  Needless to say, we were both extremely blessed by such generosity AND at having Daniel released yesterday.  THANK YOU LORD!!!  And thanks to all of you for your prayers.

Tomorrow (Wed) begins the 2nd half of this phase of chemo treatments & will be a long day.  We're also scheduled to meet with a pediatric psychologist to see if he can help Daniel with some of the stress and depression he's been dealing with.  This has become a big concern of mine recently as Daniel just doesn't seem to be dealing well with the whole situation.  10 year olds are pretty resilient little guys, but what he's gone through in the past 2 years would certainly challenge even the stoutest adult!  Most of the time, he seems fine, but any conversation about big-picture stuff, changes in plans, new challenges of ANY kind, or sometimes just for no apparent reason, he'll be in tears again.  Getting his mind off things is fairly easy with distractions, but it's clear to me that this is NOT the same as dealing with them and processing them. They're still in there "cooking" and I've yet to find a successful way to help him get them out. 

We continue to have conversations about giving things to God in prayer, about asking Him to give us peace, even about listening for His voice and imagining His arms around us.  But so far, it hasn't appeared to me to make much of a difference and he's not really come to the place where he does this on his own (maybe at all) when he needs to.

Whether the psychology department at Riley will be of any benefit remains to be seen.  As you might imagine, Dad (that would be me) has VERY mixed emotions about this, but I'm willing to give it a try and see what happens.

As always, prayers greatly appreciated!

- Tim -