Day +60: Home Sweet Home

Max is home again! Yippee! He was discharged from the hospital at about 11 am yesterday and was home at noon. The day was a blur of getting re-settled in and catching up on the normal household things that we weren't able to do while we were on our three day "vacation" to the fifth floor of Children's. :)

Max is doing great. He is thrilled to be home and feeling good overall. All of the blood cultures and tests that they took at the hospital on Wednesday were negative so we still don't know for sure what caused his fever. His ANC is back up to a good place, thanks to the help of a miracle medicine called GCSF which stimulates the bone marrow to produce cells, white cells in particular. I was trained in giving this at home and more of it will be delivered today. We will be anxious to see what is level is again on Tuesday at our Clinic visit just to be re-assured that it is continuing to climb and stay up where it should be.

We got to visit last night with Matt's sister, Molly and her husband, Jim and their two boys, Andrew and Jacob. Today is day +60 when Dr. Davies said that Max could have a friend over and he was just dying to play with someone all day yesterday. So, we decided that since his ANC was back up and the Brownley family was healthy, it was time to make it happen. We believe that we need to constantly balance the psychological aspects of this experience for all of our kids along with the physical ones. We know that feeling good mentally and being happy contributes tremendously to Max's healing. Getting to see his cousins last night and his Aunt and Uncle really brightened his whole day (more like his whole month...even six months)! It was a wonderful treat for all of us.

That's about it to report today...thankfully. Back to the same old, same old...and it's never felt better! I can't tell you how nice it is to be able to tuck all your kids into their own beds at night and then slip into your own sheets in your own quiet house...only to be followed the next morning by waking up with your whole family under one roof! The simple things I took so for granted in the past! Never again.

Thanks for your continued thoughts and prayers. By the way, this may sound unbelieveable and we didn't capture any pictures of it this time but, two of our neighbors called last evening to tell us that there was another perfect rainbow right over our house! We thought it was a beautiful sign of love from above the first time...now we know it was...twice! Someone else is very happy that we are all home together too.

Peace and love,
Kristi (and Matt, Max, Alex and Ellee)