Preston's fight against Acute Myeloid Leukemia

Preston will be going in for surgery this afternoon to have an abscess removed behind his eye and while they are in there, they will be washing out his sinuses to remove the fungal infection.

His eye the past week has dramatically improved. His eyelid is still a little swollen but compared to last weekend when it looked like he had an eyeball on top of an eyeball, it looks great. He even was up playing and watching TV for 8 to 9 hours a day this past weekend. Over the past 3 days though, Preston has just wanted to sleep all day and when he opens his eyes, he holds his head and yesterday he threw up after just standing up to go pee. Lesson learned in last few days was that his eye swelling was just superficial and does not reflect what was really going on. Monday night, James had Preston open his eye. He could open it about half way and tell you how many fingers you were holding up but he was not really able to track your finger. Tuesday, James mentioned it to the doctor’s and they said his eye has been swollen but James asked to have an ophthalmologist come and take a look at it. Well good thing he did. Yesterday, they came and after looking at his eye on the inside of his eye, he cannot track and after dilating, the nerves looked pale. They also measured that eye to be about 4 mm out further than his good eye. They said they wanted to do a CT scan to take a look. They were worried that there was something behind his eye pushing it forward and if we didn’t see what was going on, Preston could potentially have permanent damage to that eye, possibly go blind, or if it was fungal it could go to his brain and result in death.

A few hours later, Preston was down stairs getting his whole head scanned. When we came back upstairs, James was able to pull the scans up on his computer. We looked and we could see something behind his eye, see that his left sinus was still pretty full but looked a little better, and his brain looked clear. Thank you God. The night doctor came in a while later and said that she had the reports and confirmed everything we had seen looking at the scans. She laughed because we said that now that we are CT experts, we noticed. What they did see though was a fairly large abscess behind his eye. They think it is just fluid and not fungal but we will have to wait and see once they go in and remove it. The ENT surgeons and ophthalmologists were called last night to start looking at scans and the attending doctor on right now along with Dr. Martin were called about midnight to let them know what was going on. They all had a meeting this morning to discuss the plan. If ophthalmology was to do the surgery, they would go in thru his eye and have to make an incision. Preston is very fragile right now because of being so nuetropenic and his platelets are so low. The other option is for the ENT to go in, flush out his sinuses and then shave part of a bone away to get to abscess and drain it. No cuts. Since Preston has to be put under and would need to have his sinuses washed out anyway, they decided the best option is to have the ENT to do it. If they did not do it and just went in thru his eye, he could potentially have this abscess happen again.

Right now, we are just waiting for the ENT team to reschedule some other surgeries to get Preston in. I know after countless times of waiting for Preston to go in for surgery and then getting bumped, it always annoyed me so I am saying thank you and sorry to all the families waiting and getting bumped today. I am anxious for him to get in there but yet so scared. There are big risks with any surgery but Preston is a little different and in the area they are working in, it scares me. We just want so badly for him to feel better. He is getting plasma transfusion and may get some more platelets before we go down to help minimize the risk of bleeding.

Please pray for Preston today and the doctor’s doing the surgery.