A Difficult Few Days

I am writing this from my bed in Room 14 of the 5B module of the Weinberg Building. I have been here since I was admitted as an inpatient at 8 P.M. Christmas (Friday) night. It was decided to convert me to an inpatient for several reasons. First, I was running a fever of 101 F degrees. I was continuing to battle waves of nausea; acute mucositis that made swallowing anything, even liquids, very painful; and diarrhea that I could not control (I was involuntarily soiling my clothing and bed linens).

Since then, I have been continuously tethered to an IV poll with two Omni-Flow machines running concurrently, with up to eight bags being fed into my catheter at once. I have long since lost track of the array of medications that have been used to treat me. I have been getting fluids and glucose continuously, since I have been unable to keep myself fed and watered in the face of my symptoms. I have also gotten a few bags of red blood and platelets, since those counts got very low.

In addition to the usual blood tests, I have had urine and stool cultures (all negative), a chest X-ray, and CT scans of my sinuses and lungs (nothing amiss).

At this point (Sunday night), I have no fever, and the nausea and mucositis are substantially diminished in their effects. Only the diarrhea remains problematic; I will learn more about the plan for addressing this in tomorrow morning's meeting with the physician team. The really good news is that my white blood cell counts are finally beginning to rise at a fairly rapid pace. This is a very good sign that the stem cell transplant actually worked, which of course was the point of this entire exercise in the first place.