Wednesday Update

Jack was moved early this afternoon to his new room in the Oncology department. It is much more comfortable and much more private then his room at the ICU. They did another swallow test early this morning and he finally passed. He is now allowed to "ease" himself back into having liquids. He had some Ginger Ale and Diet Root Beer. He is still asking for pineapple soda (any know where to get it?). The Frosty will need to wait a little longer still.

His white blood cell count continues to be in 300s. He had another treatment last night of Campath and will have another one tonight. They are doing the drug intravenously now rather than the injection to see if it has a better effect. The doctors think because he was so swollen he wasn't getting its full impact.

Jack's platelets continue to be low even with the transfusions. The nurse said that this is typical for a cancer patient and, for now, we really can't expect it to get much higher than that. Matt also asked the doctor's about when we would know if the Campath treatments are doing their job and they said it could be another week before they know for sure.

Jack keeps taking his feeding tube out inadvertently so they have to keep putting it back in. The other night it took three tries to get it in correctly. Hopefully, he won't be on it much longer. On a lighter note, a funny story from yesterday that I forgot to mention was that Jack's nurse was a very big football player size guy (named Adam) and when he was going to get the doctor to redo Jack's tube he said "I'll be back". Fran thought is sounded a lot like Arnold Schwarzenegger and we all got a kick out of it.