Thursday, July 2, 2009

the rocky road

Round three of chemo has sucked. Round one and round two went so well, I just wasn't mentally or physically prepared for this. And obviously my poor Big Guy wasn't either. The day after the last chemo we went back to the oncologist because he was so nauseated he wouldn't eat or dring. They refered to this reaction as gastro toxicity. They did send him home but by that evening he was really feeling bad. He gave us a good scare. We rushed off the the emergency clinic. They kept him over night and gave him fluids to try to get him past this gastric reaction. He ended up having to be hospitalized after the trip to the emergency clinic. Tom picked him up from the EC in the morning and transferred him to the oncologists office. Unfortunately he had signs of yet another bad reaction to this latest chemo drug. He had hemorrhagic cystitis, which basically means the drug caused toxicity in his bladder and he started to pee blood. So they had to put a catheter in and flush out all of the urine and then flush it with saline and then put some kind of "anti-inflammatory cocktail" into his bladder. This all happened yesterday morning. The good news is that since then there has been no more blood in the urine. Hopefully that means there is no significant damage to his bladder. As of this morning they said he was drinking on his own but hasn't eaten anything. So I just cooked him up some chicken and boiled ground meat (nastiest thing ever!) and am going to take it to him soon. The hope is that there will be no more blood in his urine today and he'll be able to come home tonight.

It's been a roller coaster for sure. I never wanted to put him through anything like this. But now that we are here and the oncologist still feels we can get him past this and he still is in remission...well, I am trying not to second guess myself too much.