Wednesday 12 June 2019
Today was my first day chemo session and my appointment was for 14:30. We arrived on time and found that due to a lack of available chairs, I was having my infusion in the Teenage and Young Adults (TYA) day chemo unit. The unit was quite pleasant, as was the nurse looking after me.
It had been a week since my PICC line had been serviced, so I first had that cleaned and redressed. Then I was started off with some saline and hydrocortisone before having Bleomycin infused for half an hour. It all went pretty smoothly and we left within two hours of arriving, which was nice.
The satnav took us home via a completely different route to normal. It was very picturesque, but I’m not sure that it was any quicker. I started feeling quite sleepy on the way home.
After dinner I started feeling shivery and decided to get into bed. It wasn’t long before I was shaking somewhat uncontrollably and my temperature was spiking again, up to 38.5 C. It felt like a repeat of two nights earlier and I was dreading having to spend another exhausting emergency night in hospital. At least it was a little earlier in the evening, a bit after nine rather than eleven.
I called my oncology team and they checked the bloods they had from my day chemo visit a few hours earlier. Neutrophils were good at 2.07. We decided that I would try to ride it out, but would come into the hospital if things got any worse during the night, or if I still had a raised temperature in the morning. Fortunately I got to sleep and the fever wore off after a couple of hours. It looked to be a typical reaction to the Bleomycin.
So no emergency on this occasion. Instead I managed to get some decent sleep which was very welcome.
A Journey Through Cancer 