About the time I heard the news from my doctor yesterday about my bone marrow biopsy results, I started getting some slightly elevated temperatures. Sometimes these higher temperatures are classified as a “neutropenic fever” and they don’t worry too much about them. A neutropenic fever is caused when your white blood cell count drops down too low….well mine is pretty much at zero, so that could be the case. But just to be safe, anytime a patient gets a high temperature, they have to go through a vigorous process to get that fever to go away and eradicate any infection in my system which may or may not be causing it.
They first sent me downstairs to get a few chest x-rays to see if I was developing any lung infections or pneumonia or anything like that. That came back negative. They then did four separate blood cultures from both of my ports in my arm to test for various infections in the port and in my blood. Those came back negative. Lastly, they did more cultures directly from my arm to see if it was non-port related. Negative again. Well, all of this just means that they don’t know what is causing the temperature, and to be honest, it doesn’t matter much in the end.
They began blasting me with a number of antibiotics last night and into today. One of them was one that I took way back when I was at St. Luke’s hospital. It causes my sense of smell and taste to go to all hell. Everything from here on out is going to taste and smell like iron. I’ll be keeping the bowl of Jolly Ranchers and sour candies close by my side until they take me off of these antibiotics. Even though the fever has already gone down to like 99.8, they are still going to keep me on the regimen of antibiotics to the full length….hurray.
My roommate Tom came and visited me tonight. He was in town visiting his grandmother and sister, so he popped in for an hour or two. Tom had been talking about possibly shaving his head to show his support and such and what better time to do it than tonight.
This first picture above doesn’t quite show you the creativity that my father had with the buzzer so we took another picture to show you the full effect.
There we go…nice, Tom! I think he plans on shaving the rest off a couple of days…not sure how long he will be able to endure the harassment from friends and co-workers.
My dad and I finished off the night by watching another episode of HBO’s Rome. I bought both seasons a while back and absolutely loved them. They are definitely worth a watch if you ever get the chance.
And now for the next week or so, I will basically be sitting around and waiting for three things:
- Those last few leukemia cells that they saw in my biopsy results to die off
- My counts to start rising again…although that will take another 10 days or so.
- These headaches from the spinal tap to go away…yes they are still here and pounding.
Lastly, I would just to to wish our Green Bay Packers the best of luck tomorrow as they play the Seattle Seahawks. It should be interesting watching Holmgren in Lambeau for a playoff game!
Go Pack!
Eric