Chemo Treatment #6 - Half Way Home!

One of my best friends, Big Money, told me yesterday that my rapier wit was not coming through in recent blog posts. So we'll start this one off with a joke:

A group of managers are given an assignment to measure the height of a flagpole. So they go out to the flagpole with ladders and tape measures, and they're falling off the ladders and dropping the tape measures. The whole thing is just a mess. An engineer comes along and sees what they're trying to do, walks over, pulls the flagpole out of the ground, lays it flat, measures it from end to end, gives the measurement to one of the managers and walks away.

After the engineer has gone, one manager turns to another and laughs: "Isn't that just like an engineer? We're looking for the height and he gives us the length!"

So now that we have some humor on the table, time to get down to business. Today was Chemo Treatment #6. Only 6 more to go! Unfortunately HL got off to a good start in this round and I have some ground to make up to win this round. I've been fighting a low grade fever all week that's been chipping away at my energy. So I was worrying ahead of time that this round might be more difficult than the others. I sent a heads up email to Dr. Seifter mid-week and his reply was:

Hi Mike,
You are doing it all correctly. If you start to have shaking chills or a temperature over 100.5, let us know because you should have a CBC checked and possibly be hospitalized if the neutrophil count is under 500 in the face of fever.Eric

CBC on 21-Dec-12

The pre-chemo checkout went well. Weight, blood pressure, pulse and temperature are all fine this morning. Dr. Seifter and I spent more time talking about the Raven's quarterback woes than about anything else. Neither one of us was a Cam Cameron fan and we both don't think they should put a franchise tag on Joe Flacco. Below is my CBC. Since my counts were all fine (neutrophils or "GRAN") we proceeded as planned with today's chemo.

Mom and Dad accompanied me to chemo today, thankfully. We met Nancy for the first time. She's a a part-time nurse who works full-time at the impatient cancer center at the University of MD Hospital Center. She is also qualified, professional and caring and fits in well with Anna, Dawn and Chris.


Everything was going fine until 1pm or so. I got up to use the bathroom, toting my IV pump machine with me. When I was finished I caught a chill out of nowhere. I then developed uncontrollable chills/shakes and it caused my stomach to cramp. I almost puked and then got three additional drugs (a steroid, Benadryl, and acetaminophen). I was pretty much immobilized in the chair and we didn't go anywhere for another 90 minutes. As my dad said, it was the first time he was seeing me almost getting sick since I was 5. Here's a picture of the sad sack:

Shivering Uncontrollably Under Two Blankets

I finally settled down enough to go home. I was in no shape to drive so it was great having the rents with me. Once at home I laid in bed for a an hour and started to feel better.  

Today was not fun by any account and was, without a doubt, my worst day since starting chemo - with a score of 74 . On the flip side, it's now 11:50pm and I'm blogging whilst jacked-up on steroids. And for those keeping score, here's the Round 5 score against the average score.

Round 5 Score

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and Much Love.