My computer and clothes arrived this afternoon and I am finally feeling connected to the world again. And I have lots to update everyone on. As Brian mentioned, on Thursday I woke up in severe pain all over the right side of my body. I had started having the pain on Wednesday and brought it up to the doctor when I saw him, but he said we just had to “watch and wait.” I knew something wasn’t right though – to me it was an indication that the infection was getting worse, not better. So Friday morning we came down to the hospital, ran bloodwork and ran another CT scan which revealed that my infection had gotten significantly worse. Essentially it had not responded at all to the medication I was on. Originally, I just had some spots on my liver and a couple of tiny spots on my spleen. Now I have large spots on both. My liver is slightly swollen as a result and it pressed on nerves that surround it. Those nerves are causing referred pain up into my shoulder area. They started me right away on three different antibiotics and on Monday they will do a needle aspiration into one of the spots on my liver to see exactly what they’re dealing with.  They will also be able to test different medications on the sample so that they can be sure that the course of treatment the select for me WILL work.

My oncologist said this is just a “bump in the road.” It’s serious, but not life threatening and we just need to figure out how best to treat it. They want me to stay on as much pain medication as is tolerable because having pain like I’m having can actually cause you to not breath properly which can lead to pneumonia. Although I started slowly I’ve been taking a lot more medication throughout the day. The only problem is that it completely wipes me out and either that or the three antibiotics, is giving me nauseau. But, don’t worry, there’s a pill for that!

Oh, and one more thing, I have some sort of infection in my PICC line. Again, we’re hoping this is minor but we have to wait for the culture to grow and reveal itself.

Brian said I might go home Monday,  but I don’t anticipate going home before Tuesday, unless my body shows major improvement after this weekend.

To give you an idea of how bad the fatigue is, I started writing this post around 6 pm and it’s now 7:45. While eating my dinner and writing, I’ve probably fallen asleep ten times and woken up with food in my mouth.