Events of Day #2

This is my 50th blog post! Holy moly, I must have an awful lot to say...

So today wasn't horrible, but there were a couple of little surprises thrown in. First, I found out that my white blood count is back down to 1. I have 280 neutrophils. Basically, this is no where near enough. My body is not equipped to fight off ANY infection right now. I am neutropenic. The only puzzling thing this time around is that we don't really know why. Two weeks ago when my white count was depleted we knew it was the Cifoxitin. I went off of it at the time, took Neupogen shots, my counts recovered and all was right with the world. This time the only thing we are thinking is that the Zyvox must have caused this drop. This is not a common side effect of Zyvox, but it appears that I always get all of the fun side effects...so why not? So it's back on Neupogen for me. I will do 3 shots this week, get my blood draw twice a week, and continue with Neupogen as needed. The cruddy part is that I need to try to stay on the Zyvox for a full year. I've only been on it for 2 months. We'll see how long we can go along like this, but eventually, we may have to discontinue :-(

The second fun occurrence of the day was that the PICC team came in a few hours ago to tell me that they took another look at my Xray following my PICC placement and they realized that the line was too short. It wasn't far enough into my Superior Vena Cava. Therefore, I had to have an adjustment. Since they just needed to replace the line inside, not create a whole new hole, I turned down the drugs they offered me to take the edge off. Here's my advice! If you take anything away from this post, please let it be this. ALWAYS TAKE THE DRUGS THEY OFFER YOU TO "TAKE THE EDGE OFF". Oh my, the "adjustment" was not such a comfortable process. Nope, not at all. I sucked it up and didn't let it show, but I was in some pain :-/ I love the PICC nurses, though, so they made it more tolerable.

I am tolerating the IV Amikacin well and I think I'm still set to head home tomorrow so I can do all of this stuff for myself for the next 6 weeks. Yeah for home!!!