“Be careful: The light you see at the end of the tunnel may be that of an oncoming train.”
- Anonymous
My last chemo infusion was November 6th. Two days later, I went for a massage to celebrate the end of my treatments. It was to be the first event of many to celebrate the end of 6 months of arduous cancer treatments. It ended up being the only event.
As soon as my massage therapist saw me and heard the cough I’d had for the past 24 hours, she handed me the cordless telephone from her desk. “You look worse than you ever did on chemo,” she said. “Call your doctor.”
I did feel terrible, but I’ve become so used to feeling terrible, it didn’t feel any worse than the usual post-chemo aches and fatigue. But I obediently called my oncologist, who told me to come right away.
I had blood work and a chest x-ray. While I was in the exam room waiting for the doctor to come in, I was so exhausted I couldn’t sit up. I layed down on the table, and in less than 2 minutes, I was asleep.
My oncologist’s nurse practitioner gently woke me up and told me the results: my white count was fine at 6,000 but my chest x-ray showed a small right upper lobe infiltrate. I had pneumonia.
She gave me a prescription for an oral antibiotic and sent me home. The next morning, I felt worse. I called the cancer center, and they told me to come in. I saw the nurse practitioner again. I didn’t have a fever, my pulse was a little high and my blood pressure was borderline low, but nothing too serious. I got a liter of I.V. fluids, and then the nurse came in and disconnected my I.V.
“How do you feel?” she asked, after she’d disconnected me.
“I still don’t feel well,” I said.
“Well, we’re having a fire drill in 10 minutes, so unless you want to wait in the parking lot for an hour, you’d better go home. You’ll rest better there.”
I got home a little after 3 p.m. and fell asleep on the couch. At 9 p.m., I woke up and started watching T.V. During a commercial break, I noticed that my heart was racing. I found a clock with a second hand and took my pulse: 180 beats/minute. I knew immediately that something was wrong.
I called a friend, who drove me to the ER. After blood work and a chest x-ray, the doctor came into my room and sat down on the lid of the trashcan next to my bed. “You’re in sepsis,” he said. In less than 24 hours, my white count had increased 6-fold, the pneumonia had spread to my entire right lung, my heart rate was high and my blood pressure was low.
“That’s not what I wanted to hear,” I said, shocked that I could have gotten so sick in such a short period of time.
“I know,” he said, “but I know you work in medicine, and I wanted to shoot straight with you. We’re admitting you to the ICU.”
They started 2 I.V.’s and ran liters of fluid into my veins. They sent off more bloodwork, and started me on I.V. antibiotics.
After 13 liters of fluid, my pulse was still above 130 beats/minute. The ER doctor came back and told me that my hematocrit was dangerously low and I needed a blood transfusion.
I called my parents in Illinois. “I think you should come,” I told them.
That night in the ICU, I couldn’t sleep, so I opened my laptop and used Yale’s wireless internet to go online and read up on my diagnosis. I read that sepsis has a 50% mortality rate. I had a 50/50 chance of making it out of the hospital alive.
“What a waste,” I thought. I had gone through hell for 6 months straight…chemo, vomiting, baldness, bone pain, muscle aches, fatigue, mouth sores…and now there was a good chance I’d lose my life to pneumonia, and it would all be for nothing.
It seemed too cruel to be possible…but then so was having breast cancer at 28.
