Well, Brian was doing well but within a matters of hours on Monday, he started to feel very unwell. He was fine Monday morning, we were both feeling good that here we are 4 days after chemo and he is feeling not too bad at all. Then early afternoon, Brian started to feel unwell, said he felt tired and achy, and we put it down to him trying to do too much - you just can't keep Brian down for long. We had taken a nice 5K walk that morning and getting some groceries, so it made sense that he may feel a little tired. So he went to bed for a while in the afternoon and I kept checking his temperature and all was normal. He got up for supper but right after eating, he just completely went downhill fast. He started to get chills and was shaking, almost like he was coming down with the flu, his eyes were all glassy and he felt hot but still his temperature was normal. He decided to go to bed early and watch Olympics on TV but within the hour was up and saying when they ask how you feel on a scale of 1 to 10, I am feeling 11 right now, maybe I should take some Tylenol. I said let's take your temperature first and I was shocked to see it had shot up from 36.6 earlier to 38.0. Within five minutes, it was at 38.3 and 15 minutes later 38.6. I said we are going to the hospital. We were told any temperature of 38.3 lasting for more than an hour we had to head to the nearest emergency. The Emergency Room was absolutely packed with people. Brian grabbed a mask to wear and I told the security guard he was a chemotherapy patient and had a high temperature. He immediately notified the nurse and they triaged Brian immediately and put him in a bed - we were lucky to get one as the emergency inside and out was full of people. I must admit that I am very very impressed that they work on patients that need help immediately although you do feel sorry for the people who have probably been waiting hours. We all know what that is like. They did tests immediately and found that his red cell count was 3.1 (normal over 6) and his neutrophil count was 0. This means he had absolutely no immunity. The neutrophils are what help the white cells fight infections. The chemo had obviously completely eradicated his good cells (hopefully it was doing its job on the cancer cells too, but very scary when it takes out your immune system). They were not able to figure out where the infection was coming from either. They told us that he would be admitted so they could start high dose antibiotics. So I left the hospital around 2 o'clock knowing that Brian would be in good hands.
I arrived back to the hospital this morning and his blood counts were still dropping. His red blood cells were now 2.6 and he still had 0 neutrophils. The hospitalist contacted our oncologist who instructed them to give Brian Nupogin which is a drug that builds neutrophils quickly. Our oncologist's nurse phoned me to say that the scheduled chemo this Thursday was going to be postponed until Brian brings up all his blood counts again. This means he will be in hospital for possibly 3 or 4 days, all depending on how long it takes so they he can receive high dose antibiotics plus this Nupogin. Thankfully though, Brian's temperature had come back down to normal overnight with the help of Tylenol they gave him. He was certainly feeling a lot better this morning, so I certainly felt relieved by that.
This was certainly a real eye-opener for us though at how quickly things can change and I must admit that this makes us both nervous about the next round of chemo. If it happened once, will it happen like this again? I am sure our oncologist is going to explain all that to us and possibly they lessen the dose of chemo. It certainly doesn't make us feel too good about it but we have full trust in our doctors and we were very very happy with the care that Guelph General gave Brian yesterday. All the doctors and nurses were wonderful and they really do take care of you. We are so grateful for that.
I will continue to keep updates coming and hopefully Brian is home from the hospital by the weekend and we can have a bit of normalcy before the next round.
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