Category: Cancer

One of the criteria for going home (from the hospital) is being fever free for 48 hours. Two days ago I had a very low grade fever. Personally, I wanted a second opinion on that one, but I was ready to let it go… because it was now two days ago. This evening I developed the full bore fever, complete with chills.

Damn.

As you may know, I’m in the hospital. The chemo is done and modern medicine is doing its best to rescue me from cancer’s cure. Therein lies the rub… or more appropriately, the tub. In order to flush out my kidneys I’m on a near constant IV drip of fluids. Further, I’m on a regular diet; strongly encouraged to suck up as much of the wet stuff as I can.

Unfortunately, I am not a man of science fiction. I have no mystical reigns on the laws of physics; able to steer them at my will. Therefore, the capacity of my body to retain fluids is finite. You could hook up an IV directly to my bladder and inflate it like a water balloon… but without constant relief, it’s going to burst forth with a flow that one day will be remembered in song.

This is why I must pay hourly* homage to mankind’s unheralded achievement: indoor plumbing.

*Give or take 50 minutes.

The Euros run more juice through their sockets, right?

No matter. Fact checking is for sissies (as they say on The Report).

The latest word from the good doctor is “wait,” as in, “we’re going to have to wait before we send you home.”

Here’s a few more words he used: “next,” “week,” “uncomfortable,” and the ever popular “estimating” (when used in conjunction with “uncomfortable”).

I don’t feel it’s appropriate for me to discuss how I’ve been feeling, owing to it’s graphic nature; but I’m perfectly willing to toss around some euphemisms, if that will satisfy any latent curiosity floating around. For example: my food processor has been having problems north and south of the border. What would otherwise be normal deposits at the nearby collection center feel like the battery is somehow leaking into the exhaust. And there’s a wild, half clean animal all wound up and skulking around as if he were chained down in a cage during mating season.

Like everything else, it could all be much worse. Tomorrow I can look forward to tooling around with the Reunion software upgrade I bought this evening.

Here’s to life’s simple pleasures.

The truly good news is that the chemo is done. It hasn’t quite finished having it’s way with my body’s rapidly reproducing cells, but the corner is nigh! Shots of Neupogen have begun, to try to boost the production of my white blood cells (they tell me a count of 200 is low). And, I learned a new word today: Thrush. (Truth be told, I had heard of a bird referred to as a “Thrush.”) In this case, Thrush is a fungual infection in a person’s mouth, made possible due to immunosuppression. There’s another place this fungal infection can attack (in the non-immunosuppressed), but I have a few sensibilities, and I don’t want to discuss it.

So there!

The other day, one of those “other days” which are now relegated to the blur of my defensive mind, I was exceedingly nauseous. I was having chills, my back was spasming, and I wanted relief. The good natured nurse came in to play twenty questions (she lost by the way), and I got her back out the door to fetch me the appropriate pharmaceutical relief. That relief came in the form of two magical pills – swallowed, not implanted. The nurse helpfully suggested that I nibble on some crackers first, so that I wouldn’t vomit up the pills. Unfortunately for me, these were the first saltine crackers I’ve had the occasion to label: damn near uneatable.

Anyway, the pills arrived and I geared up for 20 minutes of war with the reflexive nature of reverse peristalsis. I swallowed the pills and 90 seconds later all hell broke lose, subjectively speaking. In the next five minutes I couldn’t have held down a sleeping dog. It was all coming up until it all came; then for good measure, my body kept trying for another few minutes.

So I’m sitting on the edge of my bed, cradling my vomit pan in a two handed manner suggesting I had recently taken up a far eastern religion, when my nurse returned.

“Well good news, It doesn’t look like you vomited up the pills.”

“…” I replied.

“So we won’t have to take them again.” She added.

“Uuuuhhh,” I replied.

“Is there anything else I can get you right now?”

“Uuuuhh, sheets?” I asked.

“Oh yeah, I can do that.”

So it occurs to me, what the fuck? Twice over in fact.

First, how the hell did I keep down two pills I’d JUST swallowed when I’d barely been able to keep down my lower intestines. And Second, I was dripping in unmentionables… surely the need for clean sheets went without saying. I should have done some follow-up on the pill issue, but fatigue won the day.

Cheryl will tell you it’s another example of my not sticking up for myself, and she may have a point. But sometimes I think I have a pretty keen sense of momentum (the kind referred to in sports and pop-psychology – not as described by Newton), and in this case momentum was SO not on my side this day.

I don’t much feel like typing, but I feel even less like talking… so here it is. My apologies to those of you who’ve called and I haven’t answered.

The fever is lingering, but so far the blood cultures have been negative – so it’s increasingly likely the fever is just a side effect of the chemo and not because of some opportunistic infection. My nausea has stuck around… ratcheting up the violence yesterday. My back, which I put out the day before the dreaded ER visit has been an almost constant partner.

So what’s good? The pain medication has taken the edge off, and combined with the nausea medication I’ve been able to sleep through much of this – even if the symptoms haven’t abated. The most significant piece of good news is that the chemo will stop sometime early Tuesday morning.

Around 4 a.m. this morning I woke up with nausea, a little dizziness, and a pounding headache. I took a quick check of my temperature, and it was 102 degrees (Fahrenheit… but you probably knew that… naturally ocurring boiling innards is pretty rare). My instructions from the oncologist were to call if I had a fever above 101, and luckily for me this qualified.

It’s now 15 hours later and I have a lovely private room at the local hospital, complete with a wireless hotspot… which made this entry possible.

Everyone entering my room comes in with a mask and gloves, which makes me a little nervous… like I’m some kind of bubble-boy.

This has been a time when I’ve been grateful beyond words for my supportive family. It’s really been the silver lining of this whole episode (if you can put such a lining on unbearable nausea and a head that feels like it’s been used as the ball in a soccer match). Unbearable might be a stretch. It’s not unbearable now… after three doses of Zofran.

You know what’s worst about all of this? It’s not the nausea (although it’s a close second), the fevers or the headaches; it’s that I have to spend the next several days tethered to an IV pole in a hospital. I don’t recall having spent the night in the hospital as a patient (I did it twice when my kids were born, that wasn’t quite the same). But every time I’ve visited someone in the hospital they’ve always looked so pathetic; like staying in the hospital was almost as bad as the illness. Staying in a hospital does something to one’s modesty – that disheveled look only adding to the effect… that look of miserableness.

Now I’m that disheveled hospital patient: ass hanging out of the infamous gown, hair in that perpetual “slept on” state.