Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Hibernation

I've made it a whole month without antibiotics!  Woo-hoo!  Having been on antibiotics almost 40 days (starting on December 20th), I'm greatly relieved to be healthy - or healthier - again.  Of course, part of being more healthy is due to my hibernating.  With few exceptions, I didn't leave the house for most of January.  I'm trying to avoid whatever germs are floating around out in the real world.  And on the few very nice days we've had here in NH, I shut off the heat and opened my doors and windows to air out the house - can't have germs floating around inside either.

Part of my hibernation, too, has been due to the several lab results in January showing that my white blood cell count was low.  All of my other labs have been good, but the WBC count just was low.  Ok, I thought, that was not unexpected. I'd been sick for a long time, had just completed a full 21 day cycle of Revlimid, and I do take a bit longer to rebound from Revlimid - of course my WBC would be low!  But I was surprised that my count was low enough to be considered 'moderately neutropenic' and 'come back in 3 days for another round of labs.'  And then on that 3rd day, 'come back for another round of labs next week', followed by 'let's wait another week to start back on Revlimid'.

So while I was told to continue avoiding any source of illness, I decided to also go back on a modified neutropenic diet - no fresh fruits, no raw veggies, no nuts, no yogurt, all foods cooked very well, for the time being.  And the hibernation continues!  I'm trying to do whatever I can, within reason (which is hard to define), to avoid infection and illness.

Still, I feel well, really well.  It's good to be without that awful, nagging upper respiratory illness.  I was sick for so long.

Today I went down to Dana-Farber for my regular every-3-month appointment.  It was a frustrating day. Somehow, my appointment was never entered in the DF calendar (even though it was confirmed just yesterday), so there were no lab orders.  Then Dr. A. found that my NH oncologist had not sent any of my reports to him since the beginning of December.  There was no record of my illness, my trip to the ER, the low blood counts.  Nothing.  So there was not much to talk about in terms of me specifically.  It the end, I had labs before I left Boston and will know the results tomorrow (I hope).  Looking forward to  good news about my WBC count!