Counts ahh ahh ahh!

Last is white blood cells. White blood cells (WBC) fight infection. A normal WBC is between 4.8-10. Another little girl who was just admitted came in with a WBC of 46. When Critter was admitted his WBC was 106! All blood cells are produced in the bone marrow and then sent out into the blood. Leukemia is the uncontrolled growth of immature white blood cells. Because they are immature they don't fight infection like they should. One type of WBC is called a neutrophil. These are in charge of fighting bacterial and fungal infections. This type of WBC makes up 60% of our WBC. We measure this type of WBC by something called the absolute neutrophil count (ANC). A normal ANC is between 3000-5000. In order to get rid of all cancer cells we need the WBC and ANC at ZERO. Today Critter's WBC was .3 and his ANC is 0! We are almost there! But because we have wiped out the stuff that usually fights infection he has no way of protecting himself from infection. If his ANC is below 500 they want us to stay in our room. We can't even roam the halls! But because he is such a high risk of infection they take this very seriously. Critter has finished his last dose of chemo for this round and now we wait for his cell counts to rise. They say we will stay at 0 or close to it for the next few days or even a week and then the counts will rise. This is called count recovery. He should bounce back pretty quickly this time, I have heard that every time the body takes longer to bounce back and every body is different so we have to wait and see what he does. Sorry for all the technical stuff but its hard to explain whats going on with out it. We watch the labs religiously because they tell us how our little boy is doing on the inside.