I orginally wrote this in the previous post but it made the whole thing just way too long. Even I fell asleep trying to read it all in one sitting. ;) So I've split the whole thing into two for those of use that are easily bored :)
The treatment plan....
I have a blood test on Tuesday next week, Wednesday I will get blood and platelets if needed.
Thursday I get the PICC line fitted, and then Friday I start chemotherapy.
It's not Adcetris at this point in time, but rather a palliative drug to tide me over, remove the lymphoma from my bone marrow and improve my quality of life in the short term.
Adcetris should be on the market in a couple of months. My life insurance has paid out so I have the money to pay for it, an estimated $120K for the full treatment. But this is now all in the future and won't happen until I relapse or the current treatment is unsuccessful.
I was about to sign off when I realised I hadn't mentioned my downward spiral with paracetamol.
I've been under the care of a diabetes nurse for a couple of weeks now as we try to come to some sort of equilibrium with regards to my blood sugar counts and my medication. All a legacy of prolonged prednisone use. She phoned me to say she had reviewed my last blood test and that my liver function was very bad.
She felt that it must be one of the diabetes drugs and that I should stop taking Metformin immediately.
I said that it was more likely because I was almost living on panadol to keep my fevers at bay.
I'm aware that you should not take more than eight tablets in 24 hours and I thought I was on top of that. However when I actually kept a record of what I took It was more like 10-12 tablets.
The more I took the sicker I was getting and the higher the fevers were between doses.
So I went cold turkey for a day and started only taking one tablet at a time and stretching the gap out as long as I could, running a low grade fever before finally taking one.
In the last 24 hours I've taken just three tablets and feel great. It just goes to show you that even the most medically self aware can get caught out by not keeping records of just what they are taking and how often. Lesson learnt! :(
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