It's been hard to sit down and update the blog this time after treatment. It feels like with every trip to New York it takes longer to decompress and start to feel slightly normal again. Three trips in the month of January to New York has been absolutely exhausting!
Last Thursday we flew back to New York for the third time. That was a some craziness. We received an email telling us that our flight was canceled and were rebooked on a flight for the next day right about the time we were getting in the car to leave for the Augusta airport. I had to call the airlines, after 15 minutes on hold I explained to the customer service rep that we could not wait until the next day to fly because my husband started his chemo pills today and has his infusion first thing in the morning. He was not helpful but, actually rude. I told him we would fly out of a different airport if we had to. After going through all the airports he said Charlotte NC was the closest airport that we could get a flight out to New York that night. He said it would be the connecting flight we were already suppose to be on and it leaves at 830 pm. It was now 345 and Charlotte was almost 4 hours away. I did ask on the phone if there was a later flight in case we could not make the 830 flight with so far to drive. He told me there was not. This was the last flight of the night. When we got to the airport the same airlines had four or five more later flights going out to New York City. . I am not sure how we made the flight but, we did.
The chemo Jody is taking is causing his shortness of breath to be worse and he has a lot of coughing spells right around when he starts the chemo pills until a few days after. Because of the shortness of breath we are using a wheelchair for any real exertion. We did use a wheelchair both ways in the airport.
When we got to chemo on Friday morning his anc was low. This is the white blood cell count that fights infection. He was almost to low to get his infusion. They decided to give it because we fly from so far away but, I would have to start giving him daily injections for 7 days to artificially stimulate wbc growth. He is also becoming very anemic and will have to start getting weekly labs done to check these levels. As well as weekly injections to boost this.
We did meet with a local oncologist last week to talk about trying to get the treatments locally. She would not take Jody because of the treatment he is getting. We are working on some more appts with oncologist a little closer to home than New York. We still have our fingers crossed we can find one closer. We are also trying to find a place closer than Atlanta that will do high dose vitamin c infusions. As of now Atlanta is the closest.
Jody should have some labs done next week that will give us more of an indication as to how he is responding to this treatment.