Saturday January 24 - Delayed Intensification - Day 11

Nicholas was rushed to the hospital today after vomiting a large amount of blood. Don't confuse this with blood in his vomit, this was vomiting total blood. They didn't have any rooms in the pediatric ward, so we had to go to the emergency room where his doctor was waiting for him. Although his blood counts were good yesterday, today they came crashing down. Vomiting blood could have contributed to this, but is also a side effect to the chemo. His blood pressure was extremely low and they are worried about additional bleeding into the stomach. As you know from earlier posts, he took a chemo last week that limited his ability to clot, so either he got an ulcer or other lining damage from the steriods or a tear in the digestive track from unknown causes, but the body wasn't able to repair itself and allowed too much bleeding. Fortunately he only had the one bought of vomiting and hasn't had another occurence in over 10 hours. They aren't convinced the bleeding has stopped, but feel confident that if it hasn't, at least it is a slow bleed. He was given plasma and blood as well as fluids and his blood pressure seemed to be heading in the right direction. We then met with the resident GI specialist who is monitoring his condition through the night. If there is additional vomitting, they will do an emergency endoscopy to determine what is happening in there and try to make repairs, but if all is well he should be able to come home tomorrow. In any event, the doctor is insisting on an endoscopy before Wednesday when he is otherwise scheduled to get back on the steriods. Assuming all goes well, I imagine we'll schedule this on Monday. The plan now is to keep him off food and drink for a while and let the stomach heal at bit and get him on a stronger stomach coat like Nexim(??) for this next dose of steriods. Please continue to pray for him. We knew this was going to be a tough time, but vomitting blood was not an option we prepard for