As you may have noticed in my past couple posts, I was feeling pretty out of control. The whole "cancer and control freaks don't mix" had never been more apparent. After my first dose of chemo, it was hard, but by week two I was feeling better and was able to play with the kids, take them to the symphony, and work full time. I felt normal. So I expected the same pattern: week1 - suck; week 2- ok.
Instead, the sores on my mouth were so painful by Monday that I could barely eat. I was way more tired than I had been during my "off week" before, whether from not sleeping well, or just managing constant pain. I'd been prescribed 6 different mouthwashes, none of which seemed to do anything, many of which were supposed to help immediately but would work for 10 minutes at best, and others which were supposed to help long term but I didn't think I could make it much longer. Finally Monday morning I talked to my oncologist and he prescribed YAMW (yet another mouthwash) and told me to take some of my leftover Vicodin from surgery. I hate taking narcotics, but I was desperate to have anything that could take the edge off the pain. So I got home and ran around the house frantically but couldn't find it. Yikes. My mother in law found me crying but I wouldn't let her interrupt Jeff because he was on an important phone call in his office - luckily he opened the door so she was able to ask him and he found some for me. Okay. Except that I took it, and not only did it make just the tiniest dent in the pain, it also started making me sick. So by Monday night I was throwing up, getting chills, and oh yeah, still in unbearable pain.
In my head, I felt my choices were 17 more weeks of this OR having my chemo drugs toned down and then ending up getting cancer again because we wouldn't be "curing" me.
And this is when getting admitted to the ER at 2am is a good thing. We drove to Swedish, it turns out I had a fever (from an unidentified infection; we chemo patients are susceptible to that sort of thing) and a really really low white blood cell count (i.e. no immune system). But it also turns out that morphine + Tylenol through an IV can work wonders on pain.
And so two days later, I'm still here and feeling a lot more under control. My mouth sores aren't gone, but they are under pain control and feel much more manageable. I'm still not eating much (although the nutritionist did send up a chocolate high-protein shake which I managed to get down; my nurse Jean was very proud of me). Best of all, my white blood cell count, which is still way too low, has at least started rising, and my fever seems to be mostly better as of this afternoon.
Most importantly, Dr. Kaplan told me that I am having a reaction to chemo that's a 12 on a scale of 1-10. But what that also means is that the cancer is really susceptible to chemo. So he's confident that he can lower the dosage for the next two rounds without effecting the overall outcome, but while preventing me from losing my marbles again. I'm going to be sticking around here till at least Friday so I will be healthy enough for my next round of chemo, and hopefully by then:
- my mouth will be mostly healed
- I'll have ways of doing pain management at home too, and
- I can get back to my bad-ass bald look, which works way, way better when I'm not pairing it with a hospital gown
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