Posts Tagged: fatigue
Reinduction
So I was re-admitted to the hospital on Monday for another round of induction chemotherapy, it consisted of two new (to me) drugs, each administered once a day for five days, so last night was my last dose of each. Now I’ll be hanging around for the next three weeks, waiting for my counts to drop down and then rebound, after which I’ll head to Boston for the transplant process.
So far it’s been pretty easy going, I’ve been walking a lot, which is both good for my health, and allows me to avoid painful shots in the stomach that they give to most patients to help avoid clots from forming in the calves. Today they disconnected me entirely so I can walk around without pushing the pole of fluids with me, which is nice too. It could be a little rough over the next two weeks, I’ll probably need some transfusions as my blood and platelets die off temporarily, though it shouldn’t really be anything I haven’t already seen in the past.
I have a lot to work on, and plenty of distractions. I should make more of an effort to try out some things, and I also have to delete photos to make room on my computer and my phone. That’s all for now!
An Upcoming Third Round
My updates have been infrequent lately, I suppose because I don’t think there has been much to report.
I had a folllowup appointment yesterday, my platelets and ANC have recovered well, which is nice, but my hemoglobin remains low, which just means I tire easy, and get a little dizzy when I first stand up, or take too many deep breaths in a row.
On Friday, July 1st, I met with the transplant doctor and her team, in Boston, to begin learning about the entire transplant process. She figured it’d begin in about six weeks, after they’ve checked me out thoroughly and decided I’m ready. I need to get a dentist appointment to make sure my mouth is in good shape before we begin. And they don’t really like going more than I think she said 8 weeks between consolidation chemotherapies and the transplant process, so I’ll be back at Dartmouth Hitchcock next week, probably Thursday, maybe Wednesday, for another round of consolidation. Mostly the consolidation chemotherapies have been pretty tolerable, though the complications afterwards — the nosebleed the first time and the fever the second time — resulted in a lot of unpleasant experiences. It feels like each one is teaching me to be more cautious about some aspect following the chemotherapy. After the nosebleed we took some extra precautions to keep my nose clean and less likely to bleed, now I’m going to take further precautions in the weeks my ANC bottoms out, make sure to wear a mask anytime I’m in public and so on.
The transplant process is going to be much longer, and tougher, than what I’ve been doing for consolidation. The chemotherapy will be much more potent, as it’s intention won’t just be to keep my immune cells somewhat suppressed, but to actual wipe the immune cells out more completely, in preparation for a donor immune system to take hold. Typically this process requires three or four weeks of hospitalization, after they wipe out the immune system, receiving the donor immune system is basically like a blood transfusion. Then hopefully it grows into my bone marrow, and begins to provide me with a new immune system. There is some concern about the new donated immune system attacking me as if I were a foreign invader, that’s called graft-vs-host-disease, or GvHD, it’s similar to the kinds of rejection they worry about with organ transplants, only in that case it is the recipient’s immune system attacking the donated organ, in my case it’d be the donated organ attacking other stuff. The main targets tend to be the skin, the lungs, and the liver, and the doctors will provide some treatments if I show signs of those problems. I saw a video a while back on bethematch.org where people who’ve gone through this said it’s actually good to have some minor symptoms of GvHD, because it means the donated immune system is working and taking hold, and there is even an effect called graft-versus-tumor, where the new immune system attacks the old one and helps kill off any remaining cancerous blast cells. There is about a 10-15% chance that the process kills me, and about a 50-60% chance that it cures me. I didn’t ask, but I think that remaining 25-40% chance that I survive the donation process but the leukemia returns, at that point we start discussing other treatment options, I suspect probably clinical trials because I think this is the only real standard way to treat aggressive leukemias at the moment.
So that’s where my adventures in health are at the moment. Mostly a high degree of uncertainty, some unpleasant future stuff, but I’m glad to be born at a time when we know at least somewhat how to deal with this problem, and not decades or centuries ago when it would have just killled me right away.
Other than that I’ve been skipping around between projects, trying to focus on some experimental camera app idea. I got a lot of photos of the Fourth of July fireworks with my app trippygram, which I’ve been sharing on Instagram. I also made a snowflake gallery, though it’s terribly mismanaged, I need to delete about a hundred photos probably. At least the ones that are very similar to one another. I got tired of sorting through them trying to decide which was better.
The Last Few Weeks
So I haven’t updated in a while, sorry about that.
Two weeks ago, on Friday the 17th, I measured a fever taking my temperature before bed — I wanted to go to bed so bad, it was 1 in the morning and I had been up at 730 for doctors appointments, things were mostly okay but I kept needing blood transfusions, I had had one that Friday, along with both blood and plasma transfusions both previous Thursdays and that previous Monday. So I had been up pretty early (for me) for a few days, and really wanted to go to bed, but I measured my temperature multiple times and mostly got above 100.4 F, which is where they want me to call and go to the emergency room, in case I have an infection. (Because without an immune system an infection could grow out of control quickly, and without many white blood cells I probably won’t even show many signs of infection, no inflammation really.)
So they put me on really strong antibiotics for a while, my fever went away after a few days, but they wanted to keep me until my ANC had returned to at least 400. On Sunday I calculated it to be 504, so they sent me home. I tried plotting all the measurements I could find for how my ANC had changed over previous weeks and treatments, and this one fit pretty well in those ones. Though some of the antibiotics I was on most of the week, I think they said they can actually have a supressive effect on my immune system, so we were kinda tugging in both directions.
Anyway, I’m all better now. Out of the hospital. Platelets went from like 27 to 50 in the last couple days at the hospital, so I’m not worried about bleeding, but my hemoglobin was still pretty low and I can definitely feel myself getting easily winded by just a little moderate exercise. Because I was in the hospital all week I had to move my appointment in Boston, where I’ll start to get to know the doctor doing the transplant. So I’ll meet her this Friday instead. Which meant I also pushed back a bunch of appointments for this Friday in Lebanon to next Friday. Last time (two Fridays ago) I met with a doctor I didn’t know well, who thought we might do a third round of consolidation chemotherapy in a few weeks. I wasn’t expecting that but the previous two rounds have been fairly easy, to I’m not too concerned about it. Apparently the chemotherapy for the bone marrow transplant is more severe, and is more likely to be another month in the hospital, so I’m trying to mentally prepare for that I think.
Now I’m working on another toy I started designing a few years ago, one that will need a few test prints I think, which is what held me up before.
Rebounding But Below Normal
So I was not re-admitted on Monday, because while my numbers are coming back up, they haven’t returned to normal levels yet, so the doctors thought it was better to delay it another week, at least. My next appointment is Tuesday (because of the holiday Monday), and they’ll just be looking for my blood counts to be in normal ranges.
My ANC was above 1000, platelets were at least 67, and hemoglobin was like 8.7 or something, so I’m not too concerned about bleeding or getting sick, but still get winded pretty easily with too much physical exertion.
In the meantime I’ve returned to programming zeeify, but I can’t seem to get the image pyramid to reconstruct the original image correctly.
I wrote a tips & tricks page for trippygram, but it could probably use a lot of editing/cleaning up/cutting down, and eventually it’d probably be nice to incorporate it into the app itself.
Numbers Update
I had an appointment to get my blood checked yesterday, and I didn’t need any transfusions, which was nice. I made some good progress on the puzzle in the waiting room. I go back Thursday, and then have it done up in Lebanon next Monday, which if everything is doing well I’ll get re-admitted for another week and do this all over again! I’m feeling okay, kinda tired still, but by the amount expected for my hemoglobin I suppose.
My ANC, the sort of first line of defense white blood cells was 0.17, on Thusday it was 0.01, and on Wednesday I had zero detectable white blood cells so the ANC wasn’t even measured. Normal is 1.4-7.7, I don’t know exactly what would be enough to be re-admitted Wednesday but it seems like theres a good chance I will be.
Other than that I guess I should be drinking more water.
1st day of HIDAC
This is an update about my health, if you’re here for something else, like my software or other projects, feel free to skip this post, otherwise you can click the read more link below
This is a friend typing for Cody again: Started Round 2 of chemo yesterday around 6pm, this round is HIDAC for High-Dose Cytarabine (I’m not sure what the A stands for). It’s one of the same drugs I had in Round 1 except in a much much much larger dose. I get it twice a day, 6am and 6pm and so far it seems to have made me very fatigued so I’ve spent most of the morning lying around which is why I haven’t responded to people’s messages. I had a fever last night and a cough, they think I might have an infection so they’re putting me back on more antibiotics and did a chest x-ray. They did another echocardiogram to look at my heart and they haven’t heard back the results yet. I guess that’s all for now.
-Cody
