Who's your hero?

In the last few days, Van had a platelet transfusion. He was seeping blood out of his central line because it couldn’t clot. After the transfusion, he was trimming the rose bushes and accidentally brushed a thorn against his face without knowing it. I looked at him and saw blood on his face. He quickly looked in the mirror and said, “Well at least it’s clotting!”. We are always so concerned he could bleed excessively when he has very low platelets. We just laughed and cleaned it up.


We started Neupogen shots that are supposed to help his neutrophils bounce back faster. Some of the side-effects of Neupogen are bone pain and flu like symptoms such as nausea and vomiting. The last time he was on Neupogen he ended up in the hospital with unbearable back pain for three days. This time they told us to stop taking it as soon as we started to feel any bone pain. It only took three shots and Van started to feel bone pain, nausea and threw up last night. He’s been sleeping all day partly because of the anti-nausea medicine he’s taking and partly because his blood counts are at their lowest. It takes 36 hours to get Neupogen out of his system and then he should be feeling a lot better.


We left one of our posters in our hospital room when they discharged us the last time. So they called us and said this poster is waiting for you next time you come for an out-patient visit. This particular poster is of the prophet Nephi and on the bottom it says “Who is your hero?”. The nurse practitioner attending that day asked Van who is this person? Is he your hero? He answered, “Yes, that’s Nephi”. Then she said, “I thought that Nephi was just a little town in Utah.” He then answered, “The town Nephi is named after this person.” He was then able to teach her about the Book of Mormon, which is a record of ancient peoples who lived on this continent and Nephi was a great Prophet among them. Just another missionary opportunity for my amazing missionary!


P.S.  The blood cultures turned out great.