Today has been a day that has felt like 12 days. When I woke up this morning, the first thing I did was check the labs on MyChart to see how Tony's blood results were all looking. When I got to the report for his Lactate Dehydrogenase I was absolutely shocked. The upper limit is 253. Last night he was 285. This morning it was 8,912. Yes, you read that right. Needless to say, we all panicked, remembering the elevated plasma numbers he had this last summer that ended with pancreatitis. I called his nurse for an update and she let me know his blood pressure had been low overnight and he had thrown up for most the night as well.
When I arrived at the hospital, I found out he'd also had a fever and had been on oxygen for a portion of the night. They did a chest x-ray early this morning and found that he has a partially collapsed lung. (Again, this happened in March as well).
Shortly after I arrived, his blood pressure measured in at 86 over 42. They gave him a bolus (fluid with electrolytes given intravenously). They also went and got the materials to take his blood pressure manually instead of using the machine. It came back a tiny bit higher when they did that about a half an hour later.
The doctors came in and said that the high LDH numbers is likely due to the body not being able to handle processing the amount of dead cell material from the chemo destroying the cancer cells. It's too much for his liver and kidneys so it's making all those levels skyrocket. They said they would give him a medication to bring down the level of Uric Acid in his body and that if that worked, they'd continue with today's chemo as planned. They also are giving him antibiotics since he's had a fever, just in case.
His blood pressure came back up for a few hours, and his fever stayed down and he was able to get some good sleep.
Then his oxygen dropped back down to 86%, so they put him back on oxygen. His temperature also spiked back up to almost 103. And his blood pressure dropped again.
His afternoon labs came back that the Uric Acid levels were back in the normal range so they decided to proceed with the chemo. He took the chemo pill at around 3, then had the intravenous chemo around 5:30. He slept most of the day until then.
We ordered him some chicken broth and some apple slices and grapes and he ate a little bit. He was up for about an hour, and has now gone back to sleep. He's really not feeling well today, and we are worried the next 7 days will be similar.
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