Sunflower

I thought I'd better do another long overdue post on how my brother is doing! Megan's blog is great, very thorough, so I'm not sure that these is so much that I can add, but I will do anyway! Please do comment if you are reading this, so I can know to carry on.

I chatted to John for a while this evening, and he is doing well. At the moment he is sitting in the Sunflower Ward, the Haematology ward, recovering from the chemo from a few weeks ago. Actually, things have been going well. His eyes have cleared up alot, so they are not so light sensitive. You can see his eyes from a few weeks ago on the left there - looking pretty scary with most of the white red! Last I saw his there were still patches of red around his iris, but it was much better. I'm sure its even better now. So he is able to read now, which is fantastic, and he can concentrate for longer and go for walks in the garden periodically, which is great. There are several fairly scary ducks in the garden. The only problem with going for walks in the garden is that you have to lug this huge drip stand around and are fearful of falling and putting your J-line out, which would be nasty. So a nice sedate walk through the garden it is, no chasing the ducks :)

He is also feeling alot better in th evenings. For the last week or two he has been starting to feel yuck mid afternoon and by the evenings he often feels terrible. Last Friday night was horrible for him. But these past two nights have been much better.

Tomorrow is blood test day (Tuesday and Thursday), so we will get to see what his blood is doing - the big question. What he should have is White blood count (WBC) about 4.6, Red blood count (RBC) about 10 or something, I forget, and platelets about 120. I think I am making us the red blood count though. At any rate, his WBC was 0.8, 0.9, 0.9, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9 etc. for ages. It went up to 1.4 last week, but was 0.9 again on Tuesday. So tomorrow will tell again... I look forward to a WBC of 3 :)

Its a bit of a weird position to be in, waiting for your body to do something you have absolutely no control over (except to pray, of course). Normally, when you are sick you wrap up, have some soup and some meds, relax a bit, sleep a bit, and things come right. There is something you can *do* to quicken your recovery. Well, there is nothing (I know of) that you can do personally to make your bone marrow make white blood cells quicker! So its a bit of a weird situation. But as I said, you can pray, and that is what we have been doing! No one whose hope is in the Lord will ever be put to shame.