Sunday, August 9, 2009

Home


So, Will is home a little more than 24 hours now. So far, so good. He is being treated for three types of lung infection (bacterial, viral and fungal). His regular pulmonary doctor was covering the ICU post-surgery duty while Will was in the hospital and stopped by to say "hello." (Will wasn't in the ICU.) He will reassess Will in clinic on the 17th and says that his suspicion is Will will be able to stop treatment for 2 of the 3 then.

They suspect what they are really treating is a CMV infection. So, that's distressing, because it can be a hard infection to treat and the medication, valganciclovir, is not benign at all. Among its side effects, it can weaken bone marrow and screw up blood production. Will's cell lines aren't completely stable as is. Lingering side-effects of chemotherapy and years of immune suppression and who knows what all mean that he will occasionally go neutropenic with no real obvious cause or warning and fights anemia pretty much all the time. So, we'll watch all that even more closely these days.

In the meantime, for at least a week, Will also is being treated with the ceftazidime (for pseudomonas infection) and voriconazole (for aspergillus). The Voriconazole gives him headaches, or at least it has in the past, and it really messes with how one of his main immune suppression medications is metabolized. So, that dosing has to be monitored very carefully. All these drugs are hard on his already taxed and weakened kidneys. So, he is (I hope) trying to stay super hydrated.
We walked to the park today and threw the tennis ball for the dog. It was a pretty tough, long walk for Will, but he made it. Activity will be pretty important to recovery, so we're off to a good start as of day 1. His sats are in the low 90s, and heart rate can creep up trying to keep up with his oxygen demand; so that's not great but hopefully the sats will go up and the heart rate down over the next few days. (If not, we'll have to do something about oxygen at home and/or he'll probably have to go back to the hospital.)

That's all. Now we wait and see if he feels better or feels worse and what happens. He reports that he feels "okay" today; no worse. So that's good.

2 comments:

Eb said...

Thinking of you all. Glad he is home and you get to do the little things - like walk the dog.
Thinking of you all.
EB

Kate said...

So glad WIll is home and is feeling "okay". I hate that treatments have side effects that suck so badly for him-- and I wish you all the simplest way through this.

Thinking of you sweet Elizabeth, and hoping today will be a very good day.

Warmly,
Kate