All done with chemo!

Finished up all my rounds of chemo with thankfully few side effects. I really only got a little bit of nausea and was able to manage it by sipping ginger ale. I have been able to eat a pretty normal diet even managing things like curry but tomato sauce apparently doesn't agree with me but this may also be affected by all the high dose steroids they have me on.

While the chemo has treated me pretty well, the rATG (or rabbit) hasn't been. Everyday I have had a different side effect from it. The first night I had these really weird muscle spasms and numbness. It wasn't like what I have had experienced with the MS. It felt different and was patchy and spreading. The staff never saw a reaction like it before and we had to call Dr Burt in the middle of the night. It ended up going away after more medications but it took awhile. After that they started pre-medicating me with more Benadryl because I was having so many reactions to it. We determined that it wasn't an allergy, just lots of side effects. Silly rabbit was affecting my heart rate and slowing down my thinking among other things. As soon as we started the rabbit I would start getting the side effects. The rabbit was causing me so much trouble that Dr Burt considered changing the schedule and adding more chemo and swapping out Day -1 which was supposed to just be rabbit but we ended up not doing that.

I was starting to get some type of throat infection so they started me on antibiotics and antibacterials a few days early. They gave me two other mouthwashes to use. The cultures haven't come back yet, and one test takes a month to get the results so I'm not real sure what the point was,but the medications seem to be working and the infection is clearing up.

I have been having some fevers but not the ones they are worried about it and this ha become less of an issue now that I'm done with the rabbit. I had to have two units of blood because my hemoglobin was low but that seems to have stabilized. My electrolytes have been low the whole time I have been here so I'm pretty much constantly getting Potassium or something else infused. My heart rate has been resting in the 50s and they are starting to get concerned about it but the EKGs and other test show my heart is acting fine, just differently. It feels fine now but sometimes they don't want me moving around too much. We are keeping an eye on it and just waiting to see what becomes normal.

All in all, the side effects have not been too frequent and have been pretty manageable. I know that there are ups and downs and just trying to take things as they come. I hope things continue to go as smoothly as they have been.