Surgery Day and Improvements

I feel like time is becoming very odd being admitted for so long. I’m starting to lose track of the days. Since last week we have just done a lot of waiting for Allison’s numbers to come up. Every single culture and test came back negative, which is a good sign that the antibiotics were already working, and we may have only found the lung infection because her white blood cells were starting to come back. This also caused a jump in the CRP, but since then it has come all the way down from the high 20s to under 2 and is stable so this is great news (goal is below 1). They switched Allison back to oral antibiotics and they changed her pain meds to something much more long lasting and less sedating. It has been working incredibly well for her pain as well. One morning she even told me she had NO pain! It's up and down but it's been months since she has said that. 

Her counts were still too low on Monday to do the surgery to clean out and close the wound as we had originally hoped. They wanted them high enough (above 500) that if any bacteria was there, and it spread as a result of the clean out, it wouldn’t cause worsening infection. So, since her numbers were rising so slowly, Tuesday they decided to give her a short acting medication to bump up her numbers faster and it worked very well. Her ANC went from 230 to 1600 in one day! Unfortunately, we still had to wait until today (Thursday) for the scheduled surgery. 

She is back in the OR now. They gave her the option of going home tomorrow for the holiday weekend (as long as pain is controlled), and coming back Monday for chemo, or just staying and doing chemo tomorrow then possibly going home by Monday. She chose to stay and go home Monday. I am as surprised as you, I’m guessing! But I understand her reasoning. We are pretty settled in that room, and going home would be a very fast turn around to coming back. This way she gets the rest of the week off next week once she IS home, so it feels like a good trade off to her. She is still requiring oxygen because of the lung infection too so maybe this will save us the hassle of setting up home oxygen as well. 

So, the plan now is pain control after surgery, (they did a nerve block that should get her through the worst of it), hopefully improving symptoms so she doesn’t have to go home on oxygen, chemo tomorrow, and then we wait for it to clear which usually takes at least 48-72 hours. It seems like with the surgery behind us we finally have the end in sight for this admission! Then the most exciting count down begins to feel more real: the countdown to the end of chemo… she has 9 rounds left and only 7 of those are inpatient now since they are switching one to be done in the infusion clinic instead. So hopefully, (as long as there are no more delays), she will be done with chemo by mid-September!