Thursday fear

So I sorta felt extra crappy on Thursday. It was similar to the feeling I had before I ended up in the hospital from neutropenic fever last time. I was worried about a potential for white cell drop. I had this haunting low-grade fever all night Thursday. It peaked at 100.3 and I'm supposed to go to the emergency room at 100.5. Needless to say, I put a rag on my head all night and didn't sleep.

We dropped the kids off at school and made a semi-surprise visit to the Clinic at Vanderbilt. I had blood-work drawn and within 20 minutes had my white counts (2,800). This is down from over 14,000 for those of you keeping up. Plenty of you probably see a disturbing progression in those numbers. My counts were wiped from 14k to 3k in 4 days. I was really worried that they'd be sitting at zero by Sunday and I'd be stuck heading into the emergency room.

Dr. Greer agreed to a Neupogen shot plus we kept our regularly scheduled Monday visit for blood work as well. I'm going to graph this to try to create a predictor of my response to Neupogen. As it stands, my gut feeling tells me that my body is wildly sensitive to the effects of chemo and is also wildly affected by Neupogen. While it would be nice to smooth out the peaks and valleys, I am grateful that I respond to Neupogen.

My experience with Neupogen was that the first shot did not cause bone pain and the second shot did. This is a flawed observation. Now that I've had the opportunity to receive only one shot, it's clear that the pain in my lower back / pelvis is just delayed by 1 day. The pain is moderate compared to the pain of two shots separated by 24 hours. Two sequential shots created pain that was basically unsleepable (it's my new verb, shut up) without a pain reliever. One shot is sleepable for me.

I had pretty serious chemo brain through Friday evening and it just 'broke' Friday night. Part of me wonders if a dwindling white count adds to chemo brain. I had this great idea for a PORT that constantly analyzes my blood content and that I could plug my iPhone into. Or better yet, some sort of meter like the blood oxygen monitor that is non-invasive and can relay white counts via wifi to the iPhone.

That's the update. I'm hoping that I've avoided a hospital stay for this session and learned a valuable lesson about managing my white counts. It's a relief to have a plan. Oh, and my superclavicular nodes are reduced visibly and to the touch.

Sincere thanks to my friends and family. I hear that Emily is organizing a run. Carneal, thanks, enough said. Tric, make the hat but I may not lose my hair, shave Tim's head either way. Day 23 now. Carey, thank your mom (UT fan making a Vandy hat must have been very painful). Rick and Lisa, thanks for taking the kids far far away. Words cannot describe.... Haynes and Dana, thanks for the moral support. TP and Kellie Conn, thanks for the calls.