February 23, 2013
Well folks, chemo sucks. It has been a miserable 3 days ever
since Thursday. She started her period on Thursday, which also happens to be
the 7th day after chemo which is the beginning of a 3-ish day period
of especially high risk for a chemo patient. Between 7 and 10 days after an infusion is when your White
Blood Cell counts are the lowest, which makes a chemo patient really
susceptible to infections. Which
after starting a naaaaaaaaaaasty
period (we understood that it would be really ugly after the fertility
preservation process because of all the hormones and stuff that they give you –
it sends the body into a tailspin which creates a really ugly flushing
process…hence to painful and heavy period) that was the straw that broke the
camel’s back. Let me paint this picture for you:
She goes to work on Thursday morning, feeling a little
wonkey, but overall not bad. This
was following several days of joint pain, nausea, lethargy and exhaustion,
weird little aches and pains that had no pattern or reason to them, poor sleep
and a super-high emotional state. About noon on Thursday she starts to feel
pretty ugly because her period had started and it was pretty heavy. Again, to be expected. By about 2:30,
she’s calling me saying that if the cramping and pain gets any worse she’s
going to the hospital. So, I left
work and spent the afternoon with her which was actually relatively calm and
nice. By Thursday evening, we
started the cramping and pain up again, and she got very little sleep, was
pitching and rolling and moaning all night and very uncomfortable.
Friday morning was ok, I ended up going to work for a few
hours and her mom came up to be with her while I was gone. Friday was uncomfortable overall for
her, she was laid out on the couch for the most part, although I guess she did
at one point get up and do some minor chores around the house and get some
movement in which at the time anyway felt good to her.
By Friday night she was teeth-chatteringly cold, achy, I
literally couldn’t touch her because her skin was so painfully sensitive and
hot to the touch. I don’t mean
warm, I mean hooooooot. Again, she
was feeling extremely cold though, so she sat in the shower with the water
running over her head until there was no hot water left, and then she sat in
front of the fireplace, WITH a space-heater in front of her, WHILE I blow dried
her hair…and THEN, in the microwave I had heated up some cloth bags full of
corn that I then put under the covers of the bed which she then crawled into
once the spa treatment in front of the fireplace had concluded. Now, to a normal person this sounds
miserable, but she was loving it.
Little did we know, this was because she was developing a nasty fever.
All day on Friday she was running a low-grade fever in the
99s. About 8pm, I took her temp
again and it was actually back down to 98, and then I checked it at 10:45 and
it was at 101, and then at 11:45 it was at 102. The cutoff at which you are supposed to get in touch with
the hospital as a chemo patient is 100.5, and the reason that we didn’t
immediately call at 10:45 when it was 101 was because of all this heat
treatment that we had done, I was hoping that maybe I had just heated her up
too much and that that was why her temp was up. How wrong I was…We checked an hour later and because of all
of that heat, even though it made her feel better, it actually drove her fever
higher. Obviously.
So, we called our oncologist, and she of course said get to
an ER, ASAP. We got to the ER at
about midnight on Friday night and they did every fluid test known to man to
try to find an infection - Blood, urine, spit, tears, sweat…just kidding on the
last 3, but the blood and urine, yes.
This took foooooorrrrrrreeeeeeeevvvvvveeeeeeerrrrrrr. They swabbed for flu and strep which
both came back negative, but 4 hours later, upon another consult with the
oncologist, they decided to admit her to McKee Medical Center because the fever
was still there and she still felt like death warmed over. So we got here to McKee about 5am this
morning (Saturday) and have been here ever since. They have put her on 3 different, bodacious antibiotics, IV
fluids, and Tylenol. We are going
to be here until at least tomorrow, depending on how long it takes to get the
fever out and to get the White Blood Cell counts up. Her WBC count was .7, and the safe range is 4-15…so
obviously, ugly.
She is resting now, very
tired, achy, lethargic but restless…despite all of that, she is actually doing
better than she has in the last few days. Last night, you could have whipped
out a good Denver omelet and a few flapjacks on her thigh, now you’d be lucky
to get an egg sunny-side up. Her
skin is significantly cooler, which is really great. I’m not joking, her skin was shockingly hot to the touch
last night. It was creepy.
The hope and the prayer is that we can go home tomorrow
afternoon. It’s hard because she
needs the antibiotics to get this infection down. We are waiting on some blood cultures and a few other tests
because as of right now there we don’t know specifically what the infection is. A few lymph nodes on her neck are
swollen, which is good cause it means they’s doin their thang. The thing that
sucks is that antibiotics also kill all the good bacteria, and she’s been told
to just expect to get a yeast infection out of this deal, and her digestion
will be jacked up for a few weeks and so on and so forth…suuuuuuuck.
Please pray for my girl – pray for healing, for rest, for comfort,
for her fever to permanently break, for her aches to go away, for sleep and for
her emotions. She’s had arguably
the most difficult 10 days of her life.
I also need prayer for rest, sleep, patience, and my ultimate reliance
on the Lord.
My most humble thanks, we love you.
Jeydrienne.
You both are in our prayers. Sending hugs!
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