chemo side effects

Up, up in the air.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 8 Comments

What do I want to do with this blog? The thought crossed my mind that just giving up on it would not be the worst-case scenario. I’ve been at it for a few years now so it wouldn’t be outrageous for me to either quit entirely or maybe just take a break over the summer. Mygawd, I’m not making any money writing it. Lots of bloggers make money on YouTube with their blogs. I don’t, so what’s the point? Maybe I could monetize my blog, attach it to a video log and turn it loose on YouTube. After all, we DO live in a capitalist society. Might work. Probably not. 

The weather has been wonderful lately if you want to lay about on a deck. I sit on the deck close to the rock/fountain and watch the birds come down for a drink. The one in the video here is a female goldfinch we think. She flits around avoiding direct contact with the fountain. It would probably knock her over if she did. 

The wisteria gives them some shelter and protection before they come down to the fountain, but they’re still wary. Smart birds. There are cats prowlin’ around here. Our princess is one of them and she’s a hunter sometimes, mostly mice, but we don’t want to tempt her with birds. She’s being such a brat lately. She seems to have figured out exactly when I’m just about to fall asleep, then she pounces on the bed, meowling like crazy and poking my face with her paw. 

Tilly has been hanging around the pond a lot lately. She patrols the perimeter sniffing around trying to get frogs to abandon their rocks along the shore. I don’t like the way she’s been fixated on frogs lately. She come close but she hasn’t caught any yet. I’d be very pissed off if she did. She spends most of her time under the deck these days where it’s cool. She’s got such a thick black coat she must really suffer in this heat, but she never complains.

Got a call from my Oncology GP this morning. He noted that my bloodwork is coming back from the lab within reference ranges (normal). Tomorrow I go to the hospital for another infusion of Daratumumab. After that, I don’t get another one until the end of August. As of this month, I’m down to once a month for the Dara. I keep taking my regular chemo meds, lenalidomide and dexamethasone, three weeks on, one week off. So, I’m in a weird space where I have no myeloma detectable in my blood, but I’ll be on chemo for the foreseeable future, that is, until the drugs don’t work anymore. At that point they’ll put me on another regime. That means that I must be vigilant around the side-effects of the chemo. It’s not always easy to tell chemo med side-effects from pain med side-effects. 

For an old man, I’m feeling pretty good these days for about fifty percent of the time. I’m sleeping moderately well most of the time, but I have wakeful nights periodically. My neck is what’s tormenting me the most these days. According to my Oncology GP I have OAD (Old Age Disease). I can’t turn my neck more than 3% left or right. Maybe 4%. Makes it hard to do shoulder checks when I’m driving. Of course, I still drive. What are you thinking? I just have to turn my whole body when I do a shoulder check. That’s fine.

Technically, I have degenerative disc syndrome and it’s common among older people. I’m getting a CT scan early next month to confirm the diagnosis. Once I get the scan, I can ask my GP for a referral to someone who might be able to do something for me. That would be good. If I do get some relief, I’ll be able to do more writing, and maybe some sculpting. I’d love to do a bit of printmaking too. Or maybe I could just lie on the couch more comfortably. That would be good.

# 80 Fun and Games with Daratumumab

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 8 Comments

It’s been almost a month since my last post. It’s not that my life has been uneventful and I have nothing to write about. On the contrary, my life over the past month has been just plain weird. Living with chemo is by definition weird, but this month has proven to me just how weird it can get. Just living it has been weird enough. Writing about it near impossible until now.

I was probably optimistic in my last post about the effectiveness of Daratumumab as an addition to the usual chemo cocktail that is given to myeloma patients upon an initial diagnosis. I’m quite confident that Dara had a huge effect on my blood serum as evidenced by my lab results, which are anything but spectacular in the about face changes that have occurred over the past month in reducing the myeloma proteins in my blood. But at what cost?

One thing I have quickly learned is that life in chemotherapy is completely unpredictable. Get used to a particular effect of the drugs and it’s sure to change the following week. So over the past month I’ve had to go to emergency at the local hospital a couple of times for bizarre spikes in my temperature. Normal body temperature is an average 37˚ Celsius or 98.6˚ Fahrenheit. My temperature is normally around 36.5˚C. We all have some variation in our body temperature depending on what we’re doing and what the environmental conditions are that we experience. All the instruction literature we get as chemo patients tells us that if our temperature goes up to 38˚C that we should immediately get ourselves to the hospital. Well, that happened one day early in the month and we dutifully got to the hospital.

Well, we went unprepared. How would we know? I was not equipped to spend three hours in the hospital never mind three days. I had no change of clothes, no toiletries and nothing to drink or eat. These were all things that I would need. I was upset because my phone was running out of power and I had no way of recharging it. I asked a nurse if there was anyway of charging it. She took it away with the promise of charging it. I inquired about it a few hours later and she had trouble finding it to start with and it had not been recharged at all. I called home and Carolyn sent up some much needed supplied including a phone charger. Still no changes of clothes however and no toiletries.

Initially I was put on a gurney then transferred to a bed in an isolation room because the staff knew that I had myeloma and hence über sensitive to infection. I was immediately hooked up to a whole set of monitoring equipment and an IV was used to pump me full of antibiotics. The fear was that I would go septic and that’s a death sentence. I slept fitfully the first night and broke out in a cold sweat every once in a while. I had a very local cellulite infection in my lower right leg but that was discounted as the source of my fever. Apparently the cellulite was coincidental.

Later that day I was moved to another room in the emergency ward right at the back of the ward with nobody around. It was quiet and they had by then removed all the wires that connected me to the monitoring equipment although the IV was left in place. I got something to eat. Hospital food is a standing joke, but it was no joke for me. I wasn’t expecting gourmet restaurant dining, but I didn’t know they could do that with eggs. I was hungry enough to force it down but a steady diet of that food would be a great weight loss plan.

Thankfully I was transferred to another ward on the third floor later that afternoon. The food didn’t improve but the surroundings sure did. I had a large room with an adjoining bathroom. I asked for toiletries and was provided with a toothbrush and toothpaste as well as a towel. My GP came to see me both while I was in emergency as well as when I was in D3 the ward I to which I was transferred from emergency. I was in the ward just a day and a half. My temperature had returned to normal by then. My GP informed me that I had a non-specific infection. They couldn’t determine why my temperature had risen as it did. The docs don’t like it when they can’t pinpoint the source of an infection. I figured that it must be an artefact of the chemo meds or my myeloma. The literature on my meds states clearly that fever can be a side effect of the drugs. That’s what I’m going with. As an aside, Carolyn just took my temperature and it was 35.4˚C. It has been as high as 38.3˚; clearly, it’s all over the place.

My GP sent me home, thankfully, the third day I was there. They couldn’t determine any cause of my fever so there was no point in keeping me in the hospital where space is at a premium. I was very happy to be going home but there was obviously something haywire somewhere so I was a bit apprehensive about it. From this day on Carolyn would take my temperature and it would fluctuate wildly but generally settle around 36.5˚C. An effect of my hospital stay is that I missed my first week of chemotherapy. We had to reschedule my program so that my chemo would start the following week on Thursday. That first few hours of chemo was a bit difficult as my body became accustomed to being assaulted by these foreign substances, especially the Daratumumab. I spent seven hours the first day and seven the next at the Cancer Care Centre at the hospital while they infused me with Daratumumab. I had a rough go of it to start with dry heaving and whatnot but it smoothed out and I have had no undue effects since.

Throughout the month my temperature fluctuated between 36.5˚C and 38˚C. It never stayed at 38˚C for any length of time so now the issue for us was when to go to the hospital and when to wait for my temperature to go down to something more normal. Well, the decision was made for me this week when on Monday I started feeling odd. My temperature was high but I was in no mood to go back to the emergency department at the hospital so we decided to wait and see. On Tuesday morning I was not feeling well at all and stayed in bed all day, something I had not previously done at all. My temperature fluctuated some during the day but was higher than normal most of the time. I noticed that my legs were sore but that was nothing new. I ‘slept’ that night but I think that unconscious would be a better description of what I experienced. On Wednesday morning early Carolyn called 911 and an ambulance came and took me to the hospital. I was effectively paralyzed from the waist down and had a high temperature.

This experience in the ER was light years different from the previous one. This time I felt respected and was treated with kindness and care. The ER doctor called for some blood and urine tests. Everything came back normal. I could stand now and take a step or two but I was very unsteady on my feet. We all decided that I should go home.

The issue that dogs us now is determining the causes of my fevers. I spoke with my local oncology GP and we decided that I would forego my Daratumumab infusion this week to see if that might make a difference to my temperature fluctuations. The jury is still out on that one. More on this in my next post which will be sooner than later.

40 Two Days in my Diary: Saturday morning addendum.

~ Roger JG Albert

6:15 AM Saturday March 21st.

I probably should have included Saturday in my original post from yesterday, because it’s also a down day due to my chemotherapy treatments. I had another dex night last night. I got my usual acid reflux but it came much later than usual, around midnight, and lasted until around 5 AM. My tinnitus is about as bad as it gets right now. I slept, I really did, for a couple of hours between 10:30 and 12:30, then I got up to pee. I sort of slept again until 2 PM but that was it. I woke up startled by a very odd dream. So I listened to some music and read some Fernand Braudel about Medieval Europe while I tried to process this weird dream I had just had.

I woke up at 2 AM in a sweat. That’s not unusual either in the first three days after taking my meds, but this time, like I just said, I woke up from a very strange dream. I wouldn’t say it was a nightmare; it was much more matter of fact than that and it was very vivid.

So, in my dream I invented a portable guillotine. It was portable with a blade a metre long and 30 centimetres thick and sprung like a chop saw. It looked more like the cutting end of a pair of garden sheers than a traditional guillotine but it worked like a guillotine. I invented it to cut up yard waste like sword fern fronds and twigs, that sort of thing. I think it’s because yesterday Carolyn worked in the yard doing clean up and she cut up a lot of sword ferns to the ground. I guess I invented this ‘machine’ to chop up these fronds to make them more compostable rather than take them to the dump in the trailer. In any case, it worked well, but then someone stole it from in front of my workshop one night. I was pissed off but resigned to just building another one. Then the neighbours started reporting that dogs and cats in the area were turning up decapitated. I figured whoever had stolen my guillotine could easily be doing this. I was mortified. Then I wondered if we’d start finding people decapitated, maybe up the logging road. Now I felt really shitty. All of that mayhem was my fault for inventing such a dangerous tool. Then I woke up.

I’ve been wracking my brain to try to wring some significance out of this dream but I can’t seem to figure it out. I invented a dangerous tool for a good cause but then found it used for very destructive purposes by person or persons unknown. What can I make of that?

In any case, today will be strange. I’ll probably have to sleep much of the afternoon after I completely come down from my dex high and am left to deal with the fallout from the cyclophosphamide and bortezomib. For my headache I’ll take a couple of Tylenol. Strange, but my peripheral neuropathy is attenuated at the moment. I wonder how long that will last. The burping is driving me nuts!

By the way, I came up with my epitaph. It goes like this:

Here lies a man who did a lot of bad things in his life.

Here lies a man who did a lot of good things in his life.

At the end he hoped it all balanced out and he would

Neither go to heaven nor to hell. He, he, he. 


Have a nice day.