Another Day at Stanford

I was doing good earlier in the week after my first dose of Velban, until things started going downhill Wednesday afternoon. It all started with a sore throat and mouth sores (which are partly due to the chemo), then followed by a severe cough, runny nose, fevers (even w/prednisone), achyness, etc. I managed to make it through work on Wednesday, but my Thursday morning, Chris had to come pick me up because I was feeling so lousy. I spent most of Thursday in bed coughing up a storm and then had a miserable night of more coughing. This morning I called Stanford and they had me go in.

I had my counts checked and a chest x-ray. The fellow "on-call" came to see me and gave me a little scare when he said there was a new area in my lung. He said he was going to call my doctor and talk to the radiologist. A while later, he came back with my doctor, which I was very relieved to see. She of course went over the x-ray with the radiologist and the "new area" turned out to be the new mass that was biopsied and is Hodgkin's. I guess they were comparing it to my last chest x-ray and since the mass wasn't there at the time they thought it was something new that we didn't know about.

After going over my symptoms and evaluating the x-ray, my doctor believes I have a mild case of bronchitis along with some type of sinus infection. She prescribed some antibiotics, cough syrup with codeine, a humidifer to sleep next to, and lots of rest. Fortunately she will be the "on-call" doctor this weekend so if I get worse at least I know I'll be in good hands!

All these little obstacles that I've had to face the last month or so have made it really difficult to work. Fortunately, I work for some of the best people I've ever known that are very caring and understanding. The days that I'm out of the office sick I still manage to put in my hours by working from home. I'm so fortunate to be able to have that option.