There were more downs than ups this week.

Monday

The doctor urged Bart to start eating. If not, he would end up in the ICU and the transplant would have failed. During our daily visit, we had a long talk, with a lot of convincing on my side to start eating. After I got home, he called and said he had eaten, not much but a beginning.

Tuesday

His blood values went down, especially the white blood cell count. Nothing to panic about the doctor said. All is normal. He started to loose weight rapidly. Another kilo today. He eats but not enough. The doctor promises him he can go home for the weekend if he stops loosing weight, his blood values are up, he is not nauseated anymore, he can walk down the hall a few times and do the stairs, he isn’t feeling like he is going to faint every 5 minutes and his blood pressure is not too high When he does come home, he needs to go straight back to the hospital if he skips one meal, vomits to much, is feeling light headed or has a fever. We knew this was going to be a tall order, but we had hope, lots of hope.

Wednesday

Second day in a row his blood values went down. Another kilo bites the dust. Not a good day especially as the home stay is in jeopardy.

Thursday

Blood values are critical, all of them : white, red and platelets. He has a severe kidney infection and is back on antibiotics. He lost another kilo. He fainted during physiotherapy. The home stay is cancelled. And this is what hit hard, too hard. His moral was below zero and nothing I could say or do, made a change. Rock bottom.

Friday

His white blood cell count is up. Not much, but hey, we will take it. All the other blood values are up very slightly, out of the danger zone. He needs to take all his medicine in pills now. He’s at 18 pills and a couple of liquid medicines. This makes it harder to eat, or to keep the food in. Result, -1 kilo. The weight loss really starts to show, he looks thin. Moral is back up. He is ready to fight again. The kids and I went to visit him today. First Bram and me, followed by Louise and Charlotte dropped in after work. We kept him awake as long as possible in the hopes he would have a good nights rest or at least sleep more than 2 or 3 hours at the time.

Saturday

It worked, he had a good night sleep. Didn’t even wake up when they came to draw blood at 04:30. I was waiting for his phone call and got really worried. When he called, he sounded rested, wasn’t in pain for the first time in a long time. Marie & I visited him in the afternoon. We had to wait till 16:00 to get the results of his blood. They were good. Again everything slightly up. Hopefully this is a new trend and he keeps it up. As the blood values go in the right direction, the weight isn’t. Another kilo vanished. He tries to eat, one small bite at the time, fighting the nausea. But he isn’t eating enough calories as his body is requesting immense amounts of energy to produce white blood cells and fight the infections.

Clearly, Bart still has a long road ahead of him. There will be other ups and downs, but hopefully more ups than downs. And the Duvel at the end of the tunnel becomes more and more appealing.:-)