Home, Week 61, Another New Chemo, Round 5

Okay, double info... Mom's count went down to 582, and it's chemo day again.

Home, Week 58, Another New Chemo, Round 4

Same thing, different day. =)

Home, Week 57

CA-125 is down to 622! This drug wasn't supposed to take time to kick in, but it appears that's the way it's acting. We'll take the blessings where we can. =)

Home, Week 55, Another New Chemo, Round 3

Well, the next step was to have another round of this same drug, now that the infection is gone. The thinking is that the infection may have caused her CA-125 to falsely be high (even though the CA-125 was weeks before the staph showed up...), so we'll see what happens. I can't logically chalk this up to anything (even though the doctor is trying), so I'm going with the doings of a higher power.

Home, Week 54.5

Preliminary blood results came back, and it looks like the staph infection is gone! So now we wait and see what the next step is. =)

Home, Week 54

I'm not quite sure how this happened, but Mom's CA-125 went down. To 792. She hasn't had chemo since the last number reading, this just kinda happened. Also, it's looking like her staph infection may actually be gone (won't know for sure until Monday, but we're optimistic), because she hasn't had anti-biotics since Monday, and she hasn't had a fever come back, so that's a positive sign as well.

Have a blessed Easter. =)

Home, Week 52.5

Okay, this has been going on for a week, but I didn't want to say anything because things weren't certain. We now have more information, so here goes.

Last Monday, when Mom was at hydration, she spiked a fever of 102.9, just 15 minutes after being normal. She was shaking with the chills. They gave her Tylenol and an anti-biotic, and she normalized enough to go home, with orders to call the doctor on call if she got a fever again overnight, and to go to the doctor in the morning. The infusion nurses took a blood culture from her port, as well as a urine culture, to try to figure out what was causing all this. The initial thought was that she was septic.

At 4am, she spiked a fever of 102.6, so we called the doctor, and because she didn't have the shaking chills, just a fever, he said take Tylenol, which worked.

The next day at the doctor's office, they had preliminary results back from the cultures, saying that she had a staph infection, but they didn't know what strain it was yet. Her urine culture was negative, but the port draw was positive. They gave her hydration and an IV anti-biotic right there in the office, with orders to have an IV anti-biotic every day for the next two weeks, and to get a peripheral blood draw (from her arm, not her port).

Wednesday, she went to the infusion center for hydration again, and they did the peripheral blood draw. They also had the final analysis of the cultures from Monday, and its staph epidermidis. The peripheral draw came back negative, but because they didn't have a peripheral blood draw at the same time as the draw from the port, they didn't know if it was an infection in her port, or an infection in the blood that could have minimized in two days.

Longer story short, she's one week into IV anti-biotics. Next week, when she's finished her second week, they'll do another blood draw, both from her port and peripherally, to see if the staph is still around. If it's gone, great. If it's in her port, but not her peripheral draw, they'll continue anti-biotics to see about killing the infection in her port. Anything after that will have to be crossed at that point. Pray extra hard for her. We need it more than you know right now.