Hi everyone,
Hope everyone had a good weekend.
Being that we didn’t provide an update last week, this blog entry will be a combination of last week’s visit with Dr. Vandermolen and an update from today. Lauren did have a little setback today which prevented her from receiving her infusion, but I will cover that later in this post.
8-1-2022
The morning started off like any other trip to Keck Medicine for her infusion session. This morning, we were scheduled to meet with Dr. Vandermolen for a routine checkup. No real significant updates from the doctor other than telling Lauren she is doing great. No concerns were brought up by Dr. Vandermolen and again, he didn’t screen for the tumor. Just the basic stethoscope to the back to check on breathing, and a glance at her legs for swelling and a check on some lymph nodes, I’m assuming. The doctor’s visit ended with Lauren addressing her sleeping concerns and Dr. Vandermolen reaffirming her usage of Ambien, and that he wants to see her in two weeks. So far so good.
I left Keck Medicine to finish up some work at home and this time it was Lauren’s mom to stick around to be with her during treatment. Treatment time from start to finish was a little longer than the previous week as Keytruda (immunotherapy) was administered. As the week went by, Lauren had her ups and downs when doing basic things around the house or even during our evening walks. She would get winded easily or would feel slightly lightheaded even with light levels of activity. We both just chalked it up to the medicine affecting her body’s ability to extract oxygen from breathing.
We are almost to today.
The weekly infusions have been a bear on Lauren compared to when they were occurring bi-weekly. With the bi-weekly infusions, they wreaked havoc on Lauren physically and mentally, but at least there was time for her to recover until the next session. During the off weeks of her bi-weekly infusions, I would say she was almost 100% in being able to do the things she wanted to do, eat what she wanted to eat, and even have an occasional sip of wine at dinner. These weekly infusions, despite the medicine not being as “harsh”, just don’t seem to allow Lauren the time to recover between appointments. Her energy levels have been extremely low because we know that she will feel lightheaded or nauseous and it’s hard to see her in this position even from just a walk around the block.
And here we are to today, 8-8-2022.
As we have mentioned before, Keck Medicine performs a blood panel before every infusion to ensure her numbers are in an acceptable range for her body to accept the chemo medicine. Today, Lauren’s hemoglobin numbers were low, low enough that the nurses were not comfortable in moving forward with treatment today. The next course of action will be tomorrow, where Lauren will undergo a blood transfusion at Hoag Hospital to help bump up her numbers. Is this the news we wanted to hear today, absolutely not, but we both knew that this might happen, especially since her numbers just don’t seem to be rebounding as fast as we had hoped for. So, as it currently stands, the blood transfusion will be tomorrow, and Lauren’s new infusion days will be on Wednesday. The silver lining to this is that Lauren should be feeling great tomorrow with added nutrients and additional red blood cells in her system, additionally the nurse said that if she hasn’t needed a blood transfusion until this point in time, she’s doing pretty good and hopefully this will be the only one she needs, but only time will tell.
I will try to get two additional updates this week covering her blood transfusion tomorrow and the blood results going into Wednesday’s infusion treatment.
Thanks for everyone’s patience and the continued support.
Love,
Chris
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