Hi Everyone,

We finally managed to make it home on Thursday, only 24hrs after we were expected to depart, due to a bit of a cock up with Zach’s drugs. After a rush hour trip home we got in the door to a cold house, which didn’t surprise me given no one had been in the house for a few days. As I opened the cupboard to the hot water tank and looked at the controller, I was met with a blank screen, after pressing every button and switching everything off and on, there was still nothing. Frustration soon turned to anger, as I thought “is there anything else that can go wrong”. I managed to get an engineer out to look at it the next day but he couldn’t help either as the part it needs, he doesn’t carry so we spent the weekend living with the hum of fan heaters. At least the immersion heater still worked so we could still get hot water.

The force is strong Zach!!!

We are now into cycle three. The fluids Zach receives during his treatment have been recalculated to avoid the bloating and other side effects of having too much fluid going around his system. He is still tolerating the feeds through his nasal gastric tube and even managed to eat some solids over the weekend which is great. His personality is starting to show a bit more, especially his temper. We often get a grunt or scream if things aren’t quite going his way which makes us laugh, unless it’s three in the morning and he’s had enough of sleeping in his cot, then I think it’s his turn to laugh.

While Zach has been in hospital, he has been collecting “beads of courage”. These come from America, and you are given them as a way of recording your stay in hospital. You get one for pretty much everything that happens to you in hospital from having an overnight stay to getting general anaesthetic, injections, treatment or dressings changed. As you can imagine Zach has quite a collection of beads now. Apparently the record for the ward is 15m, and that is a record we definitely don’t want to break. At the moment his beads are about 1m long. 

Zach is due to have another MRI scan on Wednesday to see how the treatment is affecting the brain tumour. We will write another post with the results so keep everything crossed.

Speak to you all soon.