I haven’t written in a few days and there are a couple of reasons for that.  The main one is this damn nausea.

 

Every single day since the transplant on the 4th I have had moderate to severe nausea.   I can’t keep any kind of food in my stomach for much longer than an hour.  I attribute this to the fact that the chemo and radiation absolutely obliterated the linings of my mouth, esophagus, stomach, and my small/large intestines. They are so torn up that my puke is blood red.  

 

I’ve also got these sores all over my mouth and throat.  I think I have a pretty high pain intensity and these things are absolutely horrible.  I also have really bad mucositis.  This causes the linings of my mouth and esophagus to just slough off into nothing.  My mouth is terribly dry.  I find myself brushing my teeth and tongue at least half a dozen times per day to keep the excess tissue out of there and to keep my mouth clean.

 

Because of all of the pain I’ve been going through, they finally put me on a pain pump.  It’s sole purpose is to pump narcotics into my system to help sooth some of the pain I am having.  At first they tried a drug called Dilaudid.  However, this began making me retain a lot of my urine.  It would feel like I had to go pee so bad, but when I tried, nothing would come out.  So I elected to stop the pain meds so that I could pee.  I stayed off of them for a day or two but the pain just grew at an exponential rate.  They put me back on the pain pump, this time with a drug called Fentanyl.  This stuff is like 80x more powerful than morphine so it definitely is taking care of my pain, however it’s making me very drowsy.

 

Also, now they caught me with a 102 deg temperature, which now means that I am under “special care.”   They basically put me on lock down and throw a ton of antibiotics at me until the fever is gone. 

 

There are just so many things that suck right now.  Also the insomnia which I mentioned in the last blog still hasn’t gone away.  I keep on waking up in the middle of the night with 1000 things racing through my brain.  

So I guess that I am probably at the lowest point throughout my treatment right now.  My white blood cells are gone and now I am just waiting for Lindsey’s to start growing back.  I could take 10-15 days for them to get to a level where I will be feeling better.  But until then, I will have to just keep dealing with everything that I mentioned in this journal.

 

Thank you all so much for all of the help and support!

 

Love,

Eric