It's so hard to breathe. I can take a few steps, very slowly, and feel the world caving in on me and blacking out around me.
Walking 2.5 blocks to the bus stop used to be fairly easy. Now, I have to stop about every ten steps and try to calm my heart and my lungs so I can keep going. I've already missed the bus once this week and had to wait 40 minutes until the next one came.
This feels like when I had clots in my lungs about three years ago, except that the feeling happened more gradually this time, over the course of the last week, instead of over two days.
Crud! I wonder what this means. Let's go to the doctor's office and see what my blood pressure and oxygen levels are like. O2: 84% and dropping, 83, 82, 80, 79. Okay, that's not good at all. I was hoping for at least 92%. Blood pressure: 183/103. Double crud! So my body isn't getting enough oxygen and my heart is working harder to try and compensate.
Dale, is there any point in putting off the inevitable--an ER visit? Anything else to try? Anything else to check? Drat! Is this a busy time for the ER? No. Would I rather wait until it's worse and have to come back at 1 or 3 a.m. tonight? No. Okay. Let's go.
I don't want the ER to spend a lot of time trying to rule out the universe when I'm only concerned with one, life-threatening thing, so I walk in prepared and armed.
Look! I'm having trouble breathing. The doctor's office just measured my O2 and it was 80 and dropping. My blood pressure was 183/103. I have a history of PEs, and I'd just like to ensure that I don't have them again.
"Follow me back to room 10 please. I'm Stephanie and will be organizing this little party for you today. Let me get the doctor."
He wants to know what my pertinent history is--Good thing he clarified that. We don't have three years for him to review my full medical history--and what brought me to this point. It still takes 15 mintues to recount the critical facts for the day, but he agrees that we ought to rule out PEs at least.
He offers to draw blood work, but realizes that Dr. Wendy is watching it pretty carefully. He also offers to do a cardiac workup because that's pretty normal when the lungs seem compromised. No thanks. Just rule out PEs please.
That CAT scan comes back clear. Hooray! No more 9-day hospital stays. We both figure that it's probably the chemo that's causing the dyspnea--especially since one of the drugs is know to cause lung toxicities and dizziness.
The best part of the whole visit and the part that makes it (almost) worthwhile? They were able to pull up the PET scan from yesterday and print the results for me. It didn't show any unknown lung issues. Most importantly, it also showed no more Hodgkins! There was some slight activity in the lymph nodes but so little it cannot be called cancerous activity.
Hooray! That means that we don't have to do any more ICE chemo and can proceed more quickly to the bone marrow transplant. Not that I'm so excited about getting to that point, but the quicker we're there, the quicker we can be on the road to recovery and, hopefully, cure!
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