I'm OK!

August 5, 2023

A quick note to let everyone know I’m ok! This has been an interesting week – I did have a bout of “not feeling well”, but that has mostly passed.

I got back to the hospital (sadly!) last Friday night, July 28 and started the FLAG-IDA chemo on Saturday, July 39. As usual, the chemo was pretty uneventful. The issue I would bring to you attention though, is that this chemo was highly timed, and didn’t start in the daytime hours. The chemo would start around 9:30 at night with pre-meds, then the thirty minute chemo at 10:00 or so, then maybe a 10 minute chemo “push” (depending on the day), then a four hour wait, then the final four hour chemo infusion at around 2:40 am. Yeah, I didn’t get a lot of sleep.

Anyway, I’m glad for good options here, so no complaining for too long.

The chemo infusing finished early on Wednesday August 2, and then around Thursday I started not to feel so good. A great deal of tiredness and unwillingness to do much of anything.

The good thing about being the hospital though is that they are CONSTANTLY looking at your vital signs and blood results and then can move pretty quickly if they need to with remedies. So, once I got some drugs and lots of blood and platelets, I’m back to my normal “tiredness” as of today. I can’t tell you the number of blood transfusions I’ve had at this point though, it’s humbling. If we’ve talked, you might have heard this “I wish I felt like things were working” sentiment. Glad to get that out of the way in a relatively short fashion.

I’ve also been given several shots called Grannix (?) which is supposed to boost my white blood cells counts and prime my bone marrow. It’s pretty exciting, but literally causes bone pain. Funnily enough, I’m taking Zyrtec as combat the soreness. Who knew!

For the details section of this blog, my red blood cell and platelet counts really crashed this week. My white cell counts (which have been an issue) crashed even more. They tell me that’s the good sign, so fingers and toes crossed there. For you in the know, my WBC is 0.05 as of this afternoon. They need that to rise considerably before they would let me out in the great unwashed public. (Of course, the goal with all the chemo is that all the blood cells are destroyed along with the bad blasts, so that we can rebuild them with the new transplant cells. So we want the numbers to go down. It’s such a balance.)

Lots of big thoughts this week, keeping in touch with folks and generally trying to stay positive. I will admit the hospital thing is wearing me down. I can sort of handle each day with my little activities, but thinking too much is never a good thing. John drove up to Philadelphia with Andrew earlier this week to “move” Drew into his college apartment. I’m sad to miss that, but comforted know they are both doing well together. That night, David brought over some Thai food and we watched some tv and ate together – almost normal, except so very not normal!