1/28 Not Much Happening

A fairly uneventful weekend. While Trip, Henry and I were out of town at a hockey tournament Josie remained at the hospital with Deb continuing her slow recovery. There wasn’t much going on and she remained stable most of the weekend. She was up and down on her fever but nothing major. Her episodes of nausea and vomiting continue. That means thing are pretty much the same.

Dr. Vehe was in and is impressed with how she looks. Last week’s mild Dermatomyositis flare seems to have calmed nicely.

We’re still working the project to go home this week yet. The Cellcept mixing problem might be resolved, maybe. She’s currently on intravenous Cellcept and that’s the one which has such a short shelf life requiring mixing right before administering with special safety gear. They’re considering switching her over to oral Cellcept which is much more stable and can be mixed at home with no problems. The issue is really how well Josie’s gut can absorb the drug. She’ll be tested to check her blood for Cellcept counts to make sure she’s getting enough. That decision will be made later in the week.

Her liver biopsy is scheduled for tomorrow sometime. After chatting with the GI folks they seem pretty optimistic about her liver’s long-term prognosis even though she’s having trouble now. Her lab values from today show a slight drop of her bilirubin level and a fairly significant drop of the ALT and AST liver enzyme levels, but those levels are still at about the upper limit of the sort-of-comfortably-elevated level of five times the upper limit or normal. That’s not really comfortable but higher than five times the upper limit of normal seems to be the threshold of pretty serious liver problems.

We’ll let you know the results as soon as they become available.