Post-Chemo

October 26 - Day 15

Last Saturday and Sunday, days 9 and 10, I got the final chemo drug, called Cytarabine. I got the same drug in the first induction, but this time it was given as a 3 hour IV drip, twice a day. Unfortunately, the earliest time to start is about noon, so the second dose was from midnight to 3 am. Not conducive to sleep.

A few hours later on Monday morning, I was feeling pretty bad. I had a high temperature, 39.5, and very low blood pressure - as low as 80/46. They jumped on this with antibiotics and tylenol, as well as red blood cells. (I actually got red blood cells the day before as well, because my hemoglobin count was low.) After a few hours they escalated this to the rapid response team, who determined from blood cultures that I had an infection, probably from my Hickman line which has been in for 6 months. So that was removed, and I was moved up to the ICU.

They determined the family of bacterial infection quickly, and I was already on the right antibiotics for that anyway, so I recovered quickly in the ICU and was back in my normal room the next day. I also continued to get red blood cells for a couple more days. The only problem was they needed to monitor my 'liquid output' to compare against the amount of fluid they were pumping into me, so I had to be catheterized.

The next couple of days were a lot better. My cough is getting worse though, which is affecting my sleep as well as everyone around me, and I'm having occasional low grade fevers. So today, after getting platelets, I had a CT scan.

Up to now, close to half way through this induction therapy, I'd say I'm doing better than the first one. Then I had a pretty fast, deep and prolonged decline, with slow response. This time, the decline was faster, but was handled much quicker and I got back to near normal in a day. Of course, there are still another ten days or so before my cell counts should all be climbing, so bad things can still happen.