Neutropenic Fever

Twenty four hours ago every couple of minutes in my house you heard “beep, beep, beep. Beep, beep, beep…” The sound of my thermometer getting its work out. I was having left side abdominal pain, which is where the spleen is, so my eyebrows raised. Mine is enlarged so I started learning about the spleen, it's functions and what a rupture may feel like. Spontaneous rupture without trauma is rare. Eeerk. Brakes. Rare. Basically that could be me. Kept digging and Neupogen and Nueslasta have a rare side effect of spleen rupture. So with the increase of temperature and some new pains around 8 PM we started making decisions. My mom came up, Vicki watched kids until she came, I called both hospitals, Atlanta and Cherokee asking about their protocols for Neutropenic (no white blood cell/no immune system) patients. Atlanta, “we will give you a mask and try to get you back a little faster. We are very busy.” Cherokee, “we will get you right back, we are not busy yet.” Thought was get a little blood work, maybe an antibiotic and then be home by midnight. Cherokee was awesome. They masked me outside, wheeled me straight to a room and knocked through things like lightning. My IV never hurt and she got blood out of it for the 10,000 viles. I was in love with the attending physician. She was on it until she said, but we need to admit you. I'm pretty sure skip made an ugly face and my mouth hit the floor. This was not going as planned, yet I did have an overnight bag. It was time to start the prayers and I'm just saying I've got some killer amazing prayer warriors on my side. We got a room with neutropenia alerts so everyone had to dress out before coming in. Loved my nurses though they did stuff all night long. Fever broke at 4 AM and felt kind of good. This morning the doctor made his rounds and was super nice, I really liked him, but two hours went by and the nurse is starting to tell me they're doing a CT with contrast that I'm highly allergic to. I want trying to be ugly but my first words were, “that's brilliant.” Why in the world would you give a patient who barely has any blood something that may cause anaphylaxis? And so it began. I got a boldness from above. We got the oncology doctor on the phone. We talked through things and she had not talked to the ordering doctor of the CT scan. I know he was being helpful but think she agreed with me. I mentioned the fact I went in with fever AND abdominal pain and though I know it's rare I couldn't figure out why no one had done a simple ultrasound. It was perfectly in line for why my counts would be dropping so low so fast! She said bleeding. She had suggested I hang tight for the night and then call my oncologist in the morning to get an order to be transferred. Also explained how I should always go to Atlanta no matter what. I told her I didn't think I'd be admitted. Funny part. She's who admitted me. Oops. Within 5 minutes I had a call from the floor doctor (who don't get me wrong I really liked and who apologized) that I was being transferred to the Atlanta hospital to be under her care. Well that's cool. Guess we ARE on the same page. I'm sure it's not cool to have a patient up all night that's not even your patient. About an hour later I got bucked into the EMS stretcher and immediately knew it would be a fun ride. I had them rolling about getting me out of germ land and pretty much didn't stop talking until they left. Larry was the one who sat with me and he biked, hiked and had lots to talk about. It made the trip a lot easier because it kept my mind off the fact I had to pee sooooo bad! Haha. They told me they were taking me to Key West. Somehow I ended up at Nothside hospital but I ended up on the oncology floor! At first I didn't know and my nurse comes all up in my face to introduce and I'm backing up asking about gowns. She smiles and says we don't have to AND I get to take off my mask! I can breathe again! I waited for a couple of hours to get settled but I was IV-less so I walked around, sat on my window ledge, moved to recliner. Basically anywhere but the bed. And this is where I started except with people coming in and out explaining things like being discharged and having to be readmitted to scarfing down food skip got, it's now almost three hours later. So my plan is to update via blog from this point farther. Facebook has been wonderful and the prayers are more than we could ask for, but for me, this will help. So stay tuned to the next blog, Northside Atlanta Updates.