Chemo + Day 13

Hi everyone, greetings from the San Diego box, or at least that's what I'm calling my hospital room as of late. Not to worry, I'm not as distraught now as I was when I wrote my last update, but I'm not going to lie, it's still seems very small in here. Anyway, the adjustment period seemed to take much longer for me this time compared to stints in the past, but home is where the heart is, so we'll just have to call this home for now.

It's been a handful of days since my last upodate, so there are a few things I can fill you in on. The first is that I have seemed to have had an internal reaction to some medication which has caused me to break out into a pretty bad rash. I'd say a good 70% of my body is a very bright shade of red. And it's not the non-ichy kind either. It's unfortunately quite the contrary. It is extrememly uncomfortable and once you start scratching somewhere, you're screwed. You won't stop until you literally get so mad at yourself that you yell out a swear word and make yourself stop. And just as you're doing that, another little itch pops up somehere and away you go. Oh yes, it's quite a good time, especially when you have visitors. To treat it, I have to rub a cream all over the red area a couple of times a day. If it actually did something, I might be a little more excited about that process, but it really does very little except take time and waste medicine. They took a biopsy of the rash by taking a chunk out of my shoulder and sending it to the lab. The results came back saying it was a reaction to one of the many medicinnes I'm on. Unfortunately they can't pinpoint which one so we have to deal with this by way of trial and error, but I have so many that by the time we single out which medecine it actually is, I'll be past the 5 years in remission milestone and all will be good. That was obviously a joke, but regardless of all that, we'll keep trying until it does go away by itelf which hopefully is sooner rather than later.. Until then, I'll just have to live with it.

So that's the rash story. In addition to the rash, I started running a fever the other night. It started out at 102.5 and held pretty firm at that mark for a solid night. They attribute the fever to an internal infection dealing with my urinary or possibly my intestinal tract. Again, these things are very difficult to pinpoint, but after taking some blood and urine cutltures, that's what showed up. This is the type of thing that happens just about every day in every one of us, but being that my white blood cell count is still at 0, I have no immune system to fight it off. In a normal situation, this gets killed the second it pops it's head up from whatever hole it came from, but in my case it utrns into something. Luckily for me the fever only lasted for one day and night, and inside of 48 hours it was gone. My doctors did a great job of finding out what it was early enough, and treating it with the right stuff, so even in my very compromised immune system, it really had nowhere to run. The anti-biotics they put me on in response to the threat took care of it.

This turned out to be quite a scare because if you know anything about my past, you know that infections are what brought this house of cards crashing down when I first relapsed in April. To make matters even worse, at the time of the fever, I had a really intense headache which just wouldn't go away, so I asked them to hit me with a 35mg liquid dose of Dilaudid, which is a pain killer. It is no joke when I tell you that that dosage would literally kill a huge percentage of the population if they were in a situation where they were forced to take it. Not bragging by any means and is not something I am very proud of. It's really just a reflection of how high my tolerance for pain medication has grown. Anyway, back to the story. When they hit me with this monster dose to knock the headache out of my system, it did just that. Only it also caused my oxygen intake to plummet, forcing them to make me wear the oxygen intake tubes through my nose. It also dropped my blood pressure to dangerously low levels. I think the lowest it had dropped during that few hour period of time was 88/50. As I said, this episode lasted for only a few hours, but as you could imagine, it had us pretty worried and thinking of the past, which I never want to revisit ever again. It was a great relief to see those numbers start to climb soon after they dropped that fast. Before Evey and I went to sleep that night, the oxygen mask was off and my blood pressure was back to normal. Can you say, Huge sigh of relief? So that was Friday night of this week to give you a reference point in time.

Yesterday, (Saturday) was pretty uneventful except for still having to deal with this skin rash. It actually looked like it was backing off really good on Friday morning, but that was just a tease. It came back in a big way so no luck on this thing going away on it's own nice and early. That's ok, as long as my wife still kisses me, I have nothing to worry about.

So as I said earlier, my blood counts are still in the basement which is a good thing. They need to be there for at least a little while which implies the chemotherapy is doing it's job of whipping everything out. I'm scheduled to have a bone marrow biopsy done tomorrow morning which would be day 14. That needs to come back with a favorable result meaning negative...no cancer cells detectable. Given that my counts are so low still, it all looks really good and it should come back that way. The only thing that scares me is that I made it through this round of chemo with practically zero side effects. I know this is something I should normally be jumping for joy over, but it worries the hell out of me. That little pessemistic nodule in the back of my brain is telling me that maybe I feel so good because the chemo didn't work. The bood counts say different and those are the cold hard facts, but my body is making me think differently. There have been a total of two mornings where I didn't feel well. Outside of that, and the few side effects I mentioned earlier, I have yet to throw up once, or even lose my appetite...at all. To counter that arguement, they are pumping me with all sorts of medications to quell the chemo side effects, so maybe my body is just responding to those meds very well? I don't know. All I do know is that I feel way too good to have gone through a 5 day round of high dose chemotherapy. There is no hiding from the truth which will hopefully be told on Wednesday of this week. If they in fact do get me in for the biopsy early tomorrow morning, there is a good chance that the pathology lab can turn around the results by the end of the day on Wednesday. Otherwise we wait until next week sometime. Until then, I just have to find a way to tell that pessemistic nodule in my head to shut the hell up. Only good thoughts until the facts come out with answers.

So that's about it. Hopefully my next message out to all of you will report that this rash is gone, the biopsy results came back negative with zero complications, and my white cells have started to grow. Yes, I am a greedy bastard, but when it comes to things like this, would you expect anything different? I thought not. Keep sending all of your love and supoort, and we'll keep receiving it. You guys are the best and I wish you only knew how much of a huge part you have played in keeping me alive. With that said, be well and take good care of yourselves, another update to follow shortly.

Love,

-Evey and Kurt