History, Part II

This is an account of what I remember during my stay in the hospital.  This is how I remember things being explained to me.  Especially during the first few weeks of my treatment I was horribly ill and often unable to make my own decisions regarding my care.  The pain medications I was taking gave me such vivid hallucinations I would babel nonsense while I slept.  My family will have a different take on what I went through, but here is my account.

Chemotherapy sucks.  Not that this is new and surprising information for anyone, but I had never seen someone go through chemo in my life.  Unless you go through it yourself or live with someone day-to-day who is going through it, there is no way to know how awful it can be.  The whole point of chemo is to destroy fast-growing cancer cells in your body, definitely a good thing.  The problem, however, is that it not only kills the cancer cells but many other types of fast-growing, healthy cells.  The cells lining your entire GI tract (mouth, esophagus, stomach, and intestine), hair follicles, skin cells, and immune cells can all be wiped out by chemotherapy, causing all sorts of major problems and discomforts.

A week before I went into the hospital I took a trip with my family to my uncle's house in Wisconsin.  While I was there I developed a sharp pain on my left side whenever I coughed.  It felt better after a few days and didn't think much about it.  Once I was admitted it was clear this pain was because of an infection.  Aspergillis, a common fungus, had established itself in my left lung and, because my immune system was full of non-functioning cancer cells, my body was unable to effectively fight it.  I was started on a bunch of different antibiotics and antifungals to fight it while I was undergoing chemo (since chemo would wipe out my immune system).  One of the antifungals was Amphotericin, the best antifungal out there.  It was terrible to have to take.  Besides being toxic to the kidneys (more on that later...), it would cause rigors.  My entire body would shake uncontrollably and I would feel like i was freezing.  The nurses would wrap my entire body in eight or ten hot blankets hoping to make me comfortable.  I took it every day for about three months.  At first the rigors were terrible, lasting twenty minutes or so, but by the end my body had become used to the medication and they usually didn't happen at all.

I went through two rounds of chemo - the first one I don't remember very well and the second one I do.  My first round, in early June, was two different drugs taken over seven days.  My CBC quickly fell from 100,000 to almost zero and the infection in my lung began to spread.  I slept a lot and must have had a lot of discomfort because this is when I was taking all the heavy pain meds.  My memories are hazy, but things got worse quickly.  I remember going for lots of different procedures.  They were having a hard time identifying the fungus in my lung (and thus didn't know how best to treat it).  They did a procedure to remove fluid from around the infected lung.  I think they took out a liter or two, which helped me breathe easier.  They did another procedure where they put a tube into my lung and flushed saline around in an area to try to capture spores which they could then grow and identify.  It didn't work.  And the fungus kept growing.

Then my kidneys began shutting down.  I think it was due to all the stress from the medications I was taking in tandem with the job of cleaning my blood from all the remnants of the cancer cells.  So I had to go on dialysis, which meant I had to have an access port put into my neck.  I had to go down to a procedure room to have it put in.  While I was there I kept breathing more and more quickly and my heart rate kept climbing.  I remember the nurse kept telling me I needed to calm down and breathe more slowly.  I couldn't, I didn't feel anxious, I just couldn't breathe.  The doctor putting in the port kept asking how I was doing and the nurse kept responding "not well".  Then everything just disappeared.

The fungus had spread from the bottom part of my left lung into the entire left side and began infiltrating the right.  I felt like I couldn't breathe because both of my lungs were so clogged with fungus that enough oxygen exchange wasn't occurring - I was suffocating.  So my heart kept beating faster and faster, trying to get enough oxygen to the blood, but it just couldn't keep up and I passed out.  I don't know exactly what happened next but the port was installed, I was put on a ventilator, and was taken to intensive care.  I was kept unconscious while the ventilator was in and I went through dialysis.  IRael told me later that the doctors gave me a 10% chance I would survive the multi-system organ failure and a 5% chance I would ever get off the ventilator.

They underestimated me.  I think I was on the ventilator three days before it was removed and I could breathe on my own again.  I stayed in the ICU for maybe another couple of days before I was transferred out.  By this time my immune system had began it's slow recovery and started fighting off the infection.  The next couple weeks were full of more strong pain meds, dialysis, and lots of coughing, but it seemed the worst was over, at least for the time being.