This could be the longest “home stretch” ever known. I have been so discouraged, and so exhausted... I don’t know what to do.
As most of you know, I just got back from a week long stay at two (yeah, two) hospitals. This, my friends, sucked so much that the word “suck” doesn’t even come close to explain how much this sucked.
Talk about taking the wind out of your sails.
All week long I had been feeling very tired (nothing new). I had been getting a little winded from doing simple things...like, say, standing up. Now, I knew that fatigue is a serious side effect of this chemo junk, so I just thought I was getting it pretty bad. Nothing to flip out about. I’ll just have to take it easy...and don’t stand up so much. Yeah, right.
Then things started to get a little worse. Dante decided that he was hungry at 4:00 am, which anybody who has had an infant knows its pretty typical. So he’s crying for one of us (I usually vote for Jenn at that hour) to feed him. Jenn gets up to get the baby, and I get up to use the bathroom...problem was, my short walk to the bathroom brought on such exhaustion that we got pretty scared. I couldn’t breathe at all...felt like what I imagine would be an asthma attack. I was sweating pretty bad, looked pale as ever. We decided to have my oncologist paged to find out what I should take.
As Jenn was feeding the baby, and I was trying to hold consciousness together, my oncologist returned the page. Needless to say, he told us to immediately go to the emergency room. So here we are at like four in the morning, packing up the baby and all his stuff, loading it into the car, and driving to Saints Memorial Hospital (the same place where I was when I got diagnosed). Unfortunately for me, there is no frequent flyer miles for shit like this...cause, I’d have a free Hawaiian vacation or something by now.
I had to be semi-quarantined in the emergency room because of my diminished immune system. As they looked at me in the emergency room, and as I started to feel worse and worse, it was obvious I wasn’t going anywhere. They admitted me into what should be by now the “Porzio Wing” of the hospital. They didn’t know what was wrong with me, but the doctors were pretty worried that I might have some kind of infection. My breathing was terrible and I was put on oxygen (which I stayed on for a whole week!).
At this point, I officially feel like I can’t catch a break at all.
If I can just jump ahead in the timeline to right now...its pretty interesting to note that I really don’t remember a lot of the first few days I was hospitalized. A lot of this info is kind of blurred, and a lot of it comes from Jenn. Like I said, I was in rough shape, and its kind of scary that I can’t remember everything.
So here I am, hospitalized (again), on oxygen (again), in a private room (again), served hospital food that tastes like cardboard (again) and listening to people talk about surgery (again). See, when I “roll” I carry a posse of doctors. You, and your “one doctor,” are no match for me and all the MD’s that I call my peeps.
*cough*
So, all these doctors are talking about yours truly. They’re trying to figure out just what the hell is kicking my butt, and how to fix it ASAP.
All the vistors who came to see me had to wear a mask in my room. The nurses, family and friends took a mask out of the box that was outside my room. I felt like the boy in the bubble.
Of course, I write a lot of this with a sense of humor (or I try!), but the truth is that the doctors thought it was pretty serious, because...well, because it was. See some of them thought I had this PCP (not the kind of stuff James Brown goes ape on). PCP is a type of pneumonia that can be common in people with weak immune systems. PCP kills lots of people. You’ve probably heard of someone who had cancer or AIDS, and heard that they died from pneumonia... well, this is the type of pneumonia they usually die from.
And some of the doctors think I got it.
brilliant.
Anyways, they want to do this surgery called a bronchoscopy. Thats where they stick a tube down your nose all the way down to your lungs to take a sample to test it. Needless to say, I really REALLY wanted to have this done. However, the doctors didn’t think I was well enough to have any kind of procedure like that done. So they won. My oxygen levels were so low if I took the breathing thing off for 5 seconds, I would almost collapse. All of us (myself, Jenn, and the immediate family) were pretty worried. We didn’t know exactly what was wrong, and I wasn’t well enough to have any tests done that might state what it was. They put me on IV antibiotics (Bactrim) and hoped it would work in a few days.
Every day in the hospital came with new tests that I could do. Blood drawn several times a day, the breathing monitors, heart monitors, the whole 9. I didn’t know when I would get out, but we knew that I would be in the hospital for both Valentines Day and Jenn’s birthday. Valentines Day be damned, I was upset that I was hospitalized on Jenn’s 30th birthday (yeah, she’s OLD, I know, but go easy on her). I couldn’t even go out to buy a flippin’ card for her. Instead, I asked the nurses for some markers and paper and I made her one before she came to visit me for the day. Scary part is, I don’t remember making the card...but I did make one, and I have seen it since I left the hospital. I’m no Monet or anything, but I did pretty damn good considering all the cords and tubes coming out of me! Yeah, Jenn got cheated out of a nice birthday dinner...but I think she only cared about me getting better. I know that when I’m all done with this cancer stuff and I’m in the clear that she’ll remind me that I owe her...if you know Jenn, you know it to be true. And if Jenn is reading this, I’m only kidding.
After a couple of days I had one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had in my life. They wheeled me down to have a CAT scan done. Part of getting a CAT scan is that they inject a dye (called a contrast) into you sometimes to get a better picture. The nurse tapped a vein in the top of my left hand that would be used for the dye. I had the scan done, but when they put the dye in I immediately threw up and started to feel some serious pain in my left hand. Now throughout this whole thing I’ve had plenty of CAT scans, with plenty of contrast...never a problem, until now. They said that they got enough pictures, so they sent me back upstairs to my wonderful prison cell...eh, hospital suite. The tap was still in my hand.
A nurse...we’ll call her “the witch,” came in to switch some of my iv medications. Jenn (feeding Dante), my father, and Jenn’s mother were all hanging out in my room. The nurse injected some saline in my tap to flush it out because she wanted to hook up one of the antibiotics into it. The second she pushed the plunger I felt a pain like I have never felt before in my life. It was like an electrical shock that went right up my left arm, up along side my neck, and into my brain. I shot up in my hospital bed screaming. I told her how bad it hurt, and asked if she could take it out and put it somewhere else. She told me that I must be sick of getting needles by this point...I said she was right, but I’ll take it over that pain. She decided to throw out the fact that I felt the pain, and decided to push the antibiotic in.
This is when it got reeeeeal ugly.
I was in the worst pain in my life. For some reason I started to hyperventilate really bad, and I started to choke. I felt like I was drowning. Breathing rapidly, but no air getting into my lungs. Doctors started rushing into the room. My face, arms, and legs went completely numb. I started to cough up blood all over the sheets on my bed. I have never been so scared in all my life. The doctors and nurses were scrambling around, my father was trying to comfort me and get my body under control, Jenn’s mom was standing in front of her so she couldn’t see me and all the blood coming up. I really wished Jenn and the baby weren’t there for this...it was scary enough for me, nevermind her.
For what seemed like 10 minutes, it was pure hell. Doctors were making sure that I didn’t have a reaction to the mediation, nurses were calling out my levels (breathing, heart rate, etc). Finally....FINALLY, my body started to slow down and I regained control. The pain diminished, and I decided to call the nurse a few choice names that I probably shouldn’t have said infront of my mother-in-law. But, hey, they’re on my side. I really, truly, honestly thought I was going to collapse... I was beyond scared.
Both Jenn and myself wanted me to be in a Boston hospital (closer to my oncologist). For the first 5 days, I wasn’t well enough to be transfered. But then the doctors said I was well enough, and a bed had opened on the cancer floor of Brigham & Womens hospital in Boston (this hospital is affiliated - and connected - with Dana Farber where I receive my chemo treatments... its also the hospital Dante was born at). One night, at like 10pm, after Jenn went home and I was all alone, they packed me up, wheeled me out in the bed, loaded me into an ambulance, and drove me down to Boston. I felt a lot better that I was closer to my oncologist. Things were getting a bit better for me. I was still on the oxygen, but now they were talking about slowly taking me off of it.
I had been on antibiotics so long that it was pointless to have the procedure done, because they wouldn’t be able to read any results. I was getting a bit better (now I could almost walk all the way to the bathroom!) and the end of this illness/stay was getting closer. My nurse at B&W would now take me for a walk around the floor and monitor my oxygen levels. Every day they were getting better and better...but it took a while to get them to where they wanted them to be.
But I did get better...and I was released, after like 8 days. I missed a chemotherapy session because of this whole thing. My oncologist, visiting me in my room before I left, wanted to start right back up again...too much time in between treatments can really screw with things. So sure enough, 2 days later, I’m getting chemo’d again.
