April 24, 2011
-
Postponed again?!
Posted by Stephanie 3:00pm CST from the apartment Houston, TX
Let me start by wishing everyone a Happy Easter! How I wish I were back home to be spending the holiday at church and with family and friends. Instead, it’s just mom and I having our own little celebration down here. We’ll have a great meal and a good day, but we’re missing being at home!
As I mentioned in my last post, I was due to start chemo this morning. Really, what celebrates the resurrection of Jesus better than getting hooked up to chemo?
Sammy wondered if maybe they’d give me jelly beans with my chemo. If they don’t, then they should! Anyways, getting hooked up today was the plan, but my bloodwork this past Friday showed my platelets were still not high enough to start chemo. In fact, they were going down! Huh?! After rising to 99k a week earlier at my Dr. Benny appointment and then stalling out (which is part of what kept me from starting on the original chemo date), they were down to 85 on Friday. I certainly didn’t see that one coming! I thought an extra week would’ve been plenty of time for them to nudge up over the 100k mark. Double dipping platelets (where they come up, then drop again) is not a new thing with chemo regiments I’ve been on–they’ve done that in years past. However, it wasn’t expected with this regiment, especially since my counts don’t drop much in the first place. You’d think that if my immune system doesn’t get terribly suppressed by the chemo, it wouldn’t take much for it to bounce back, right? Eh, I’m sure there’s flaw to that logic. My sluggish platelets and white count are proof of that, I suppose.There was a bit of scrambling on Friday to figure out what to do about chemo Sunday and my dropping platelets. My medical team is not in clinic on Fridays, so there wasn’t anyone easily reachable who could lay out a plan. In fact, Dr. Benjamin is going to be out for a couple of months due to having surgery himself! Instead of trying to reach another doctor who wasn’t yet familiar with my case, the triage nurse called my P.A. Kathy. At first there was talk of still aiming for Sunday, but really, there was not much of a chance of my platelets recovering in a day and a half, so she made the call to postpone chemo for a second time. We’ll try again for Tuesday. Hopefully that’ll be enough time for my platelets to get their act together, though I’m not terribly hopeful. I’ll have bloodwork tomorrow morning to see how we’re doing.
The frustrating part is that there is no easy solution for low platelets. I don’t qualify for a transfusion–they’ve got to be below 10k for that. And besides, that would be a temporary fix. True, it might let me start the next round, but there’s still an underlying reason for my platelets to be slow in rebounding, and that will still be the case after a transfusion. There was a drug study I enrolled in after my liver surgery in 2008 (when I was on Adriamycin/DTIC) for a medication called Nplate. It’s a platelet booster usually used for ITP, a non-chemo/cancer related condition that causes low platelet count. If my platelets aren’t up tomorrow, I’ll inquire about that again.
Looks it’s not just my platelets that are sluggish to rebound. Even with five days of Leukine injections, my white count on Friday was only 3.7, still below normal. If there’s one good thing, it’s that I didn’t experience any of the expected side effects that go with it–achiness, fatigue, even fever and chills.
I’m obviously not a doctor, but if parts of my immune system are this slow to recover, I’m thinking I may not be able to continue with as many rounds of chemo as planned. Today is five weeks since the start of the last round. That means we’re moving into the sixth week between rounds with a chemo regiment that is meant to be done every three weeks. If we continue with so much time between rounds, I don’t know if that lessens the effectiveness, and plus, I can’t imagine my medical team moving forward with a regiment that could eventually cause my immune system to go kaput for good. I know they’ll work to get this next round in, I just don’t know if we’ll have to alter the plan and not do those two extra rounds after all. I always thought it would be problems with my C02 that would put a halt to things, not white count or platelets! I guess I probably should stop speculating. I might be completely wrong, they could find a solution to the problem, and things could go on swimmingly. Who knows? As usual, just gotta play things by ear.
The plan is for mom and I to come home after this next round. Don’t know when that’ll be yet, but by the time it finally happens, it will have been at least two months since my last visit home. The big question is, will we know when it’s safe to travel home early enough to buy plane tickets that don’t cost an arm and a leg? If not, looks like we’ll be driving (provided we’d have a week or longer for the trip). It’d be nice if we could know what would need to be done to help my counts after this next round, but I won’t hold my breath.
That’s about it for the medical end of things. Mom and I have actually managed to stay entertained this week by running errands, having a couple of meals out and seeing a movie. Right now, the apartment smells like a mix of ham and cloves, mac and cheese and sweet potato goodness as we prepare our Easter feast. It’s going to be so good! I hope everyone has a blessed Easter and a good start to the week. I think Sammy’s planning to post soon with the happenings back home, including the neverending rain and our basement flooding adventures! Adios for now.
-Steph
