All The Prayers We Can Get

I sent out a mass email yesterday to lots of you requesting prayers or whatever you've got in you for our Joaquin. I don't mean to be an alarmist; I think I just needed the comfort and support of those who we love and love us. The more I think about it the less worried I am. The more responses I read in return from my email the better I feel.

Saturday morning Joaquin woke up with a fever and red splotches all over his body. I called his Stanford doctors and they were pretty confident it was just a symptom of the virus that he was fighting but since they didn't have him in front of them to confirm this they suggested that we take him in to be seen. Chris took him in and the doctor agreed that it looked viral. The doctor in Stanford that Chris spoke to a day later about this said that it was a good sign that he was fighting something viral along with the fact that the rest of our house was also fighting something as well. The concern with flu-like symptoms and a fever is, of course, rejection because those can be symptoms of rejections - but not always. The doctor said it made him feel good that he had the red splotches along with his flu-symptoms and fever because it all pointed to a viral infection rather than rejection.

Anyway, so that day at the Urgent Care they took a urine sample and saw his urine had some suspect stuff in it. It wasn't a "clean catch," which means that Joaquin hadn't had a shower in a couple of days. Usually when we do a urine sample we take a shower or bath and then clean the area up really good. There have been a couple of times that a urine sample has come back saying he had something in it when really the culprit was a "dirty catch." So Chris brought him home, Joaquin took a shower, we cleaned him up good and we did a clean catch at home and took it back to the lab. They did a urine culture this time, in which means they let the sample sit for 48 hours to see if it would grow anything. In the meantime, the doctors had prescribed some antibiotics that not only are good for urinary tract infections (UTI's) and pneumonia, among other things. After the clean catch was returned we started the antibiotics, just to be on the safe side. Usually, I don't like to do antibiotics "just to be on the safe side" but there were other factors influencing my (and our) decision to start them before we had received the results.

So like I said before, we got a call back from the Urgent Care and they said that the results said "proteus" which is something found in the gastrointestinal tract and is usually uncommon in causing UTI's. What they usually see as the cause of UTI's is e.coli. But they said that proteus was sensitive to the type of antibiotics Joaquin had started taking already and that by now he should be feeling better. And he is.

Naturally, after I got the message from the Urgent Care I started getting worried about what if this is rejection. There is no link between UTI's and rejections. Joaquin's nurse was saying that he probably had a virus and a UTI - a double whammy, so to speak. I asked if they were concerned about rejection and she said, "Let's just do labs tomorrow and we can ease everyone's concerns." Now, Joaquin's nurse has never been very good at easing my fears or making me feel better but there was not an urgency behind getting the labs. They just wanted them done this week or Monday. So we went in this morning for labs.

Every day I'm seeing improvement in him. Every day he's getting off the couch a little more, he's needing less Tylenol, he's eating a little more, he's drinking better. We went in for labs yesterday and they were not able to get any blood so we had to go in this morning again. We were successful this morning, thankfully.

So we will most likely have results from the labs late this afternoon and I'll update everyone then. Thanks again for your love and support.