HI everyone!!!

I hope that everyone is doing well!! I know that a few of you follow Samantha’s carepage, but I will post an update for those of you who remember me … It has been a while since I have checked in. Samantha is doing well. Her cancer is completely gone and, God willing, will never be back. She is getting G-CSF 3 times a week to boost her immune system. It really seems to be helping her, she is not constantly sick. She is still on Neocate 1+ and probably will be for a while. We give her 40 oz a day through the tube (she refuses to drink it) Any food that she eats is a bonus. The only problem is that when she eats large amounts of food (not neocate) she has really bad diarrhea. We are working with the GI to try and figure that out. He thinks that she may have dumping syndrome so we have to limit the amount of food that she has at one time. It seems to be helping, but he is looking into other causes also. She still has bowel movements 5-6 times a day everyday, diarrhea or not. So he wants to look into that. He did some more labs on her, including a celiac panel. We will see how that turns out. We are very excited, she is up to 25 pounds now!!! She has been 25 lbs before but it has been about 4 months since she has been there.

Lance has been having numerous problems with constipation and severe abdominal pain. Last week we did an endoscopy and colonoscopy on him and it turns out that he still has pretty significant reflux. He had coffee ground blood in his stomach and his whole stomach and lower 1/3 of his esophagus was red and inflamed. He started on prevacid and he is going to continue his Miralax. We also have Levsin and Bentyl for if his stomach is giving him pains. His biopsies were normal, so we are going to treat it like Irritable Bowel Syndrome and significant reflux. We are already seeing some improvement on the prevacid, his appetite has really increased. Hopefully this will help. The bad thing is we really did not see any signs of reflux in him. We thought that it was all from the constipation, I feel really bad about that.

Well I guess that is all for now. Take care!!!

Janice2006-11-21 15:34:36