Cycle 3, Day 16 - Chemo is Done!

I'm still alive. Usually when I don't blog for a while it's because I've been hospitalized but that's happily not the case this time. This time I've just been too tired. I spend most of my mornings working myself out of bed. My lungs/cough is the worst it's ever been, especially when I first wake up. It takes me about an hour to go from lying down to up and at em. If I move faster than that I cough till I throw up. My afternoons I spend at Cancer Care where my Internet connection has been shotty as of late. And by the evening I'm usually exhausted. Plus I get my bout of evening chills. It's like clockwork. Every evening at around 6 my chills start and my temperature spikes a little. It lasts for an hour or two and then it goes away. So there has been no place in my day for computer stuff.

Today though I have lots of time to blog because I'm at Cancer Care for 6-8 hours and so far the Internet connection is good. Why am I at Cancer Care for 6-8 hours? I'll back up a little. Last Monday and Tuesday I was feeling pretty good, especially for days 7 and 8 of my cycle. I still didn't feel great but I was letting myself get excited about getting back to normal life. All I could think about was doing normal things like: playing with Anthony, cleaning out the garage, family grocery shopping. Normal everyday things seem exciting when you've been in bed for 2 months. Even going back to work is maybe not exciting but I look forward to it. I haven't worked since July 24th. I haven't driven a car for over a month. I have only been outside after dark 3 times in the last 2 months and 2 of those times was coming home from the hospital. Basically what I'm trying to say is that I'm sick of being sick and my mind started to get ahead of my body.

Last Wednesday kicked me back into reality. I got my Bleomycin and was feeling OK until 10 at night when my fever spiked a little to 37.8 and I developed a wicked headache and I started to feel generally unwell. On Thursday the fever and headache were better but I still felt crappy. Then Thursday night my fever spiked to 38.7 overnight. I should have called the on-call oncologist but I just didn't have it in me to go to the emergency room at 3 AM so I took some Tylenol and went back to bed. In the morning I called my clinic and my doctor ordered a CBC (complete blood count) for when I was in that afternoon for fluid and antibiotics which I get everyday. It showed that once again my counts had all plummeted. So we've been doing a CBC daily ever since to monitor my counts. On Saturday my platelets were low enough that we discontinued my blood thinner injections and on Sunday they dropped low enough that I had a platelet transfusion. My neutrophils and white cells are basically non existent so once again I'm wide open to infection. Nothing yet, so the daily IV antibiotics are probably working as hoped and keeping me out of the hospital. And my hemoglobin is also dangerously low. Hemoglobin is a major part of the red blood cell and it carries oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body. Normal hemoglobin is something like 140-180. Most people would get a blood transfusion if their level hit 80-85. Mine as of yesterday was 71. My doctor, because of my age (young and awesome) thought mine would bounce back and was hoping to not have to transfuse me. But I am feeling pretty terrible and it's been trending downward for the last 5 days so today I am getting a blood transfusion. 

I still remember the first time I saw a patient getting a blood transfusion. It was day 5 of my first cycle of chemo. I have a pretty weak stomach and I wasn't feeling well, so when I came in and sat down and there, across the room, was a woman with a bag of blood hanging above her head, I almost threw up. I was very close to asking to get moved to another room but that seemed pretty rude so I closed my eyes and went to sleep instead. Now after 2 months of coming to Cancer Care and seeing blood transfusions every other day, I'm fine with it. The thought that I'm about to get 2 bags of someone else's blood pumped into me still weirds me out a little but if it makes me feel better, I'm all over it. The thought of a blood transfusion seems like a big deal but it's actually pretty common place with cancer patients. The chemo shit kicks you and sometimes your body repairs itself fast enough and sometimes you have to get a transfusion. Some patients get a transfusion so they can stay on track with their chemo and guys like me just want to be able to sit up without seeing stars.

I was also supposed to get my last Bleomycin treatment today but my doctor cancelled that because of my lungs/cough situation. So I am officially done chemo and from here it's all recovery. I'm excited about that but I'll be more excited when I can go from the car to my bed without my heart pounding out of my chest and coughing so much that I almost throw up.



That's it for now. As I was typing this my blood results came back and my hemoglobin today is down to 66. I was hoping it would come back higher and that I could avoid a blood transfusion but that was not meant to be. Oh well. I'm hoping it won't be another week and a half until I blog again but who knows what the cancer adventure has in store.