The Scare of Nick's Life

Well we began Round 2 on Monday morning. Deb and Nick arrived around 9am and spent the first few hours waiting. Waiting for the blood work, waiting for the doctor's, waiting for a room. Finally around 4 pm, Nick began to receive his treatments. All went well for the first 12 hours.

Sometime during the night, Nick's temperature began to creep up and we started to fear that he may have an infection. By mid day on Tuesday, Nick's temp had hit 104 and his blood pressure had dropped to a dangerously low level. The fear of a systemic blood infection was real. Since Nick was already into his course of chemo, this meant that he had a limited ability to fight the infection, so they began to aggressively treat him as if this were a life threatening issue. He was immediately brought up to the intensive care unit and put on numerous drugs to try and get his blood pressure up to normal levels. These included dopamine, norepinephrine and epinephrine. These are naturally occurring chemicals in your body that are usually released during times of stress, like when you are scared. The doctor equated these medications to Nick medically receiving "the scare of his life". Deb and I can attest to the fact that it was one of the biggest scare of our lives. It actually becomes surreal to see. One minute it is relatively calm and then all of a sudden there are over a dozen people in the room, doctors, oncologists, pharmacists, nurses, etc. I have to say that for all that was going on, putting in multiple IV's drugs, transferring to a different floor, it was relatively calm. To see him hooked up to several IV's with a combination of 8 different drugs running is something I hope we never have to see again.

The good news is that by this morning, Nick was back to his normal self. His pressures were stable, his fever down and he was constantly complaining about all of the stuff attached to him. Complaining is a good sign and today they hope to ween him off of the meds and hope that his body picks up where it left off yesterday. We are still waiting for the results of the blood culture to see what the infection was or whether or not this was some reaction to the chemo drugs. So for today, they have decided to suspend his cyclophosphamide treatment so as not to stress his body any more than necessary. He will remain in the ICU for another day just to make sure he is stable and then he will hopefully be able to move back downstairs and regain some of his freedom. I know that both he and Deb are looking forward to their daily walks around the hallways.

I will keep you all posted on his progress over the next few days.