Kendi Update #2 (and Gillispie update)

Hi all,

Just doing a blog post rather than sending individual responses right now. Please forgive me if you wrote privately and I haven't responded yet.

Kendi is still in the hospital. Eric is staying with her tonight so that I could come home and get clean and rested before heading back tomorrow. Taevy is at the hospital with Eric--his "eyes" and a great all-around helper.

Kendi is doing okay. It's just a high fever. It's been coming down with ibuprofen, but continues to spike above 103 without medicine. She didn't eat ANYTHING from yesterday morning until this afternoon, but did finally start to want to eat again right AFTER they took her untouched lunch away--of course! Since then she's eaten a banana, a bite of cookie, 1/4 of a hamburger, and 5 french fries. Yes, quite the healthy menu. But right now she gets to eat whatever she wants as long as she will EAT!

We thought we had found the culprit shortly after arriving at the hospital. Strep. Bad breath, a bad looking tongue and an ucky looking throat. But nope. Not strep.

The malaria smears take 24-48 hours. That test was started yesterday, then today (thanks to our PID doc) the hospital realized they had done something incorrectly with the smear, so they are doing that over again tomorrow morning. Then we STILL have 24-48 hours until results come.

They are testing for EBV (aka mono) tomorrow morning as well. That test can take 1-4 days.

Our PID doc reminded the local doc the idea to test for tick-born illnesses. A GOOD idea, as ticks have been horrible this year. I've picked three off of me in the last week, and one off of Kendi (but that was after her fever started). They are tiny little buggers, so I could have easily missed a tick on Kendi. They are starting her on Doxy in case it is a tick-born illness. I'm not sure why yet (no time to research now) but word is that our PID doc will want to treat a tick illness very aggressively. I'm guessing that means ticks and HIV don't mix well.

Kendi is supposed to have a chest x-ray tonight to rule out pneumonia. Can't imagine it would be that since she's not in the least congested, but for some reason they feel it's important. My personal guess is that it's a case of docs that aren't all that familiar with HIV wanting to rule put PCP pneumonia (even though that is an opportunistic infection that I can't IMAGINE Kendi would have, based on her good HIV numbers).

Bottom line is that they either want Kendi to start getting well on her own or have a reason for this fever before they let her go home. I don't even want to think about her being in the hospital another 4 days waiting for the EPV results. Ugh.

This is really a whole different post, but we really covet your prayers over our family right now. There is such spiritual warfare going on. Sammy had a (past-illness/food-related) breakdown last week. I've had a killer headache for almost a week. Kendi with this illness and hospital stay. Whatever is going on with Bright is becoming more and more acute (at least to me) by the day (really odd behaviors we've got to get feedback on soon). The car is making a weird noise AND a headlight just went out (11 days before we're taking our first non-medical-related road trip EVER)! According to a kidney ultrasound last week, Miss Okie (Eric's kidney) is trying hard to make a kidney stone. Kidney stones and transplant kidneys--not such a good match. One of those things is no big deal. All of those things starts to get exhausting quick. We must be doing something right for satan to care so much about trying to bring down the fam right now, right?!

There is always something to praise! So here's the PRAISE REPORT!

Eric's creatinine level was 1.13 today! That's the best it's been in weeks!

AND...drum roll please...

KENDI'S HIV VIRAL LOAD IS NO UNDETECTABLE!!!!!! That means that in less than 6 months the copies of HIV in her body have gone from 173,000 copies to less than 48 copies! The HIV tests can't even read the HIV in her body because the copies of the virus are so few. This is the gold standard for HIV patients! Her CD4 percentage is great too--at 36%.

Back up to the hopsital now, as Eric forgot to bring his 7:30am medications with him!