Those who follow Nadia’s Quest on twitter and the facebook know that we crossed a milestone yesterday. They measured some white blood cells! Instead of measuring < 0.1 they measured 0.1 two days in a row. This is an indication that Nadia’s bone marrow is starting to produce blood cells, and is the first step towards building her new immune system. Once the white blood count (WBC) reaches 0.5 they will be able to start counting neutrophils (ANC). When ANC is at 0.5 two days in a row, Nadia will be able to leave isolation and enters ‘stepdown’ isolation. We will describe what this means in a later post. For a refresher on what these abbreviations mean, see Day +3 post. For those interested, we have started a new Counts Pool. Can you guess the first day Nadia will be allowed to leave the room?
Even with this forward progress, Nadia will still need blood and platelet transfusions until her bone marrow can produce enough of these cells to keep the levels high. So, having celebrated her counts yesterday, she still needed a red blood cell transfusion to increase her Hgb count. These red cells bring oxygen to your body and when red cell counts get low the patient usually gets tired. Nadia has lived her life so far with a low red cell count, so when she gets a transfusion she is super-charged! Check out the videos below. Put Hulk Hogan in the middle of that ring and Nadia would definitely take him out! <stomp stomp stomp stomp>
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In our ‘normal’, pre BMT life we would do laundry roughly once a week, and the volume varies between 3 and 5 loads typically. This has certainly changed with Nadia in isolation.
Remember the 2 hour rule about food? If Nadia’s lips touch something (food or drink) a 2 hr time starts for that item. After 2 hours it has to leave the room. This precaution is to prevent bacteria growing on food items, which could become airborne, inhaled by Nadia, and eventually lead to an infection for a little girl without an immune system. Well, this rule holds true for clothing too. If she sucks on the corner of her blanket (something she ~never~ did before coming into isolation), or spills food on her clothes, she gets a change. This means we are going through about 3 blankets, 1 or 2 Jellys or Poohs, and several wardrobe changes a day.
Also, mommy and daddy can only wear something once before it has to be washed.
As a result, each night we do 2 to 3 loads of laundry (depending on volumes and colours). Each load needs to be dried on high heat. Once dry, and cooled off to prevent any condensation, the clean clothes are put into a clean plastic bag. This clean plastic bag is then placed inside another clean plastic bag for good measure. The double-bagging procedure is necessary because we have very little storage space in our anteroom, and it is not uncommon to snag and tear a bag. A hole in the bag means the items within are contaminated (remember – germaphobe mentality here!). So far we have had a few tears in the outer bag, but not though both bags.
While doing laundry is not that big of a job, it is time consuming, often limiting how early we can go to bed when one of us spends the night at the condo. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, daddy will wake up and put the dryer on again for good measure. Scooby takes a long time to dry …
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