Back Home (Again)!

Tiffany had her second session of chemotherapy from August 21-25, and got to come home from the hospital on Saturday the 26th. But she developed a fever the next day, which for can be very dangerous for patients with decreased immune function.

Chemotherapy can be very hard on any cell in the body. The reason chemo works against cancer is that cancer cells typically are very fast-growing cells, and they draw a lot of nutrients from the body. At the same time, they also draw a lot of the chemotherapy drugs from the bloodstream, and that's what kills the cancer cells. But the process isn't perfect, because chemo drugs end up in other parts of the body too. One of the things that can be most affected are the cells of the blood - red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets. So Tiffany's doctors are always monitoring her blood count to make sure that her blood is able to function well enough to do the things it's supposed to, like for the immune system to fight infections. When a chemotherapy patient gets a fever, it can indicate that the body has an infection, and it is very hard for an immuno-suppressed body to fight an infection on its own.

When Tiffany developed a fever, her dad called the doctors and they told him to bring her in to the hospital to get antibiotics right away. She went in on Monday the 28th, and only got to come home on Saturday September 2nd. They had to give her a blood transfusion to get more healthy blood in her. Tiffany's white blood count (WBC) dropped down to 200 (a normal child ranges from 5,000 - 1o,000) They continued to monitor her, and once her WBC rose back up to 1,000 she was OK'd to come home.

So when people come to visit Tiffany, we want to make sure make sure they're not sick, because she's very succeptible to catching germs. For that same reason, we're all really careful about washing our hands, and making sure that food is handled safely. There are germs everywhere, and our healthy bodies can fight them off almost all of the time, but Tiffany's immune system is working at a fraction of its normal strength.