Friday, June 29, 2012

Neutropenia

You get to feel like your luck is pretty bad.

Seriously. When some doctor tells you "you've got cancer," it's pretty hard not to feel unlucky. I know plenty of 30-somethings who don't have cancer, why the fuck should I? Hell I know lots of 50-somethings who have lived cancer free lives, so I must not have the greatest luck to be where I am.

I've written before about how cancer lowers your expectations, redefines normal and adjusts all the scales. Everything becomes relative to the big C. Like how "lucky" I am to have Hodgkin's and not some inoperable, fatal spine tumor or something.

But even within the relative luck of Hodgkin's, the not serious cancer, things are pretty unlucky and serious.

ICE chemo does not discriminate between good cells and cancer cells, so it hits your blood counts hard. Patients often enter a state called neutropenia; a neutropenic person lacks white blood cells, most importantly a kind of white blood cell called neutrophils, which fight infection. This does not necessarily happen to everyone, but it definitely happened to me. I had to give myself a shot (a cancer first) to minimize the window of neutropenic time.

Many neutropenic patients go about their lives just fine until their counts recover. Avoiding bacteria and disease is key. This is of course not 100% possible since bacteria live everywhere. Neutropenia is like taking off your armor in battle and relying on the other guys to miss. It's a game for luckier folks than I.

A week ago I ran a fever that spiked at 101.5. In my state, there was no way to avoid being hospitalized, pumped full of broad-spectrum antibiotics, and put into a bubble until my counts recovered. (OK, it's not a literal bubble, just a room I can't leave.)

Finally decide to take some vacation time and I spend half of it in the hospital knowing I'll be back Independence Day for more chemo. And this round will crush my cells, so I could just be trapped in this cycle until superchemo. An infection this time does not mean there will be another one later.

You know, if I'm lucky.

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