Friday, June 20, 2008

Caution...For Mature Audiences Only

There are many symptoms from having High Dose Chemotherapy and one of them is called Mucositis. I forgot to mention when I was talking to you about receiving the chemotherapy for 2 days that a really important part.....see? CHEMO BRAIN..... as I was saying the really important part of those days was CONSTANTLY having ICE CHIPS in my mouth. Studies have shown that if the patient uses ice while receiving chemo, the chances of developing mucositis in the mouth decreases significantly. I was rabid about keeping ice in my mouth for 2 solid days because there is not that many things that I can control in this situation and I'll be damned if I wasn't going to embrace what I could control. I am very proud to say that I had ABSOLUTELY NO MOUTH SORES because of what I did. The problem is however that even though I kept my mouth from getting mucositis, there was no guarantees for the rest of my GI tract. That, my friends was up for grabs! I couldn't make the ice go down any further or believe me I would have. So, I started experiencing some of the GI symptoms of mucositis around the 19th of May and this entry is being written on the 22nd, so for about 4 days now I have been occasionally throwing up this mucousy mucousy and foamy type vomit and tons of diarrhea. It was so gross. It was neon green/yellow in color so it actually stained my clothes if any got on it. Sorry for the graphic nature of this program, but I'm telling you the way it was. So the evening of Thursday May 22nd after a 7 hour day in the BMT clinic getting my blood out and then dripping in platelets, fluids and getting shots in the belly of 2 different meds. we went back to the apartment. I had, what we we have come to affectionately call as "episodes" a few times that day at the clinic. An episode consists of throwing up, or gagging or dry heaving mucous and most times it was all 3, and/or diarrhea attacks that at times I didn't even know were coming, and therefore were late catching (oh those times were fun). So at 8:00 pm....we hadn't been home but maybe 3 hours from the BMT clinic, when I had an "episode" and Mom put her hands on my forehead (oh that feels good when you're throwing up....my mom's cool hand) and she felt that I was warm. Kate took my temperature and anything over 100.5 is considered a fever in Bone Marrow Transplant,m World since you have no immune system. My temp was 100.7. Kate called the Clinic and told them what was going on and a doctor called back and long story short...... we packed my sorry ass up in the car and drove back to Moffitt and I was admitted as an IN-PATIENT. I was soooooooooo upset as I wanted to do this thing so badly on an out-patient basis. The WHOLE thing. I felt like I failed. I was in the hospital about 3 years ago for something totally unrelated, so I have horrible memories of being in a hospital. The hospital smell, the hard beds. the skinny plastic pillows, the food........just the whole thought of it makes me want to hurl and now here I am an inpatient and I wasn't even admitted to the Bone Marrow Transplant Unit as they were full so I was admitted to an "overflow" unit. Of course, every patient there has some kind of cancer, but only 3 of us on this particular unit were Bone Marrow Transplant patients. So May 22nd turned out to be a dark day for me and little did I know at the time, that I would be in the hospital for ONE WEEK. Stay tuned for details.

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