Thursday, February 12, 2009

Where do I Begin?

Well just as I have titled this blog post I am having a hard time knowing where to start. I should be more diligent in updating this thing then I won't fell overwhelmed when over 3 weeks have gone by and a million things have happened. But to tell you the truth everything happened so quickly that time just seemed to slip right by. I am going to try to remember what I can and give everyone a little taste of what has been going on.
Shortly after I wrote my last post with some good news I woke up just a couple days later not feeling that great. This sickness continued through the weekend and then that Monday I went into the ER. I was having persistent nausea and vomiting and a horrible headache that went along with it. After spending 16 hours in the ER they finally transferred me to a hospital room. They then informed me that after doing an x-ray of my abdomen they discovered "free air" in it. Which I guess is a very serious thing and can mean immediate surgery. So I had a surgeon team checking on me every couple hours seeing if I was getting any worse to know if I would have to go to ICU for surgery. I was a little overwhelmed thinking, "what in the world is going on here?" Through the next few days my symptoms didn't worsen and I actually continued to get better so they were ruling out the "serious" thing they thought it was. Fortunately I didn't have to undergo surgery and they were a little baffled at what caused this. In the end my doctors said it might have been an affect of the transplant and they have only ever seen this in one other patient. Another miracle that we can only give credit to God for. So along with all that fun stuff I had a ton of tests and procedures done to make sure the nausea, vomiting and headaches were not more serious than just a spell. So bring on the x-rays, CT scans, MRI's, lumbar punctures and stomach endoscopy's. I defiantly had my share of them the 12 days I spent in the hospital. Fortunately everything always came back clean. They switched some of my meds around and it seems to be helping my headaches a little.
I have been home for 2 weeks now and things have been alright. I have been having my ups and downs. My energy level isn't super great and I have been resting quite a bit. The other not so great thing is they had to up my steroid dose quite a bit again. I broke out in the GVHD rash pretty bad, so to get it under control they had to increase my steroids again. I am tapering them down but it wasn't that much fun going backwards. Hopefully it wont last long and I can get off of them without any more flare ups soon. I am ready to get rid of this swelling and muscle atrophy pretty bad. But my blood work continues to look good every week so that is something to be thankful for. So tomorrow I go and get my catheter removed from my chest due to it shifting inside and get a picc line put in my arm. So it seems that there is never a dull moment and I continue to take it one day at a time.