Days 10 and 11

It gets monotonous after a while doesn't it. I pretty much now know what it is like to be a walking dead man, so to speak. I go to the Methodist Hospital Eisenberg building 9th floor nursing station 4 twice a day. They take blood samples so they can check my complete blood count (which tells them how many white blood cells, red blood cells, and platelets I have or don't have is more like it) and my electrolytes. As I have mentioned before, my white blood cell count is down in the basement which is both a good and bad thing. It is good because it indicates the high dose chemotherapy is working (recall one of the nurses said it was enough to kill six people and I believe it has just about killed me six times :) Obviously, it is bad because bacteria living on my skin and inside me can kill me. That is why I wear a surgical mask in public and go twice a day and get two kinds of IV antibiotics. So far, they have been able to keep everything in check. I get a fever and chills once or twice a day which is controlled with Tylenol. The antibiotics mess up my stomach so I don't care to eat anything and almost never get hungry -- so I have to force myself as much as possible. Which is hard when delicious chocolate confections you would normally have to force yourself to avoid taste more like dirt and tend to make you gag. One of the aspects of shutting down your salivary glands and mucosa with chemo is that food no longer tastes the same. So you have to be careful what you shove in your big mouth thinking how delicious it has always tasted in the past. Sometimes that holds but most of the time it doesn't because just about everything tastes different.

Anyway, back to station 94, I got side tracked. The results of the CBC also tells them whether I need platelets and/or red blood cells. They have given me platelets almost every time I have been in there for the last four days. So far, they have given me four units of blood because my red blood cells were real low. Of course, until my stem cells begin to ingraft and begin making all the various kinds of blood cells I need. Station 94 has to keep me alive with an auxiliary supply.