A funny thing happened on the way to recovery

(8/30/09)
Out of the frying pan. . .

So I finally got out of the hospital on Tuesday night. My lung did its job in sealing itself up, though there was some residual air left in my pleural space that occasionally makes a fun gurgly feeling when I get up out of bed. I went to see my oncologist on Wednesday, and the good news is the pathology found no signs of cancer. No signs of anything else, either, though. No infection: viral, bacterial, or fungal. The prevailing theory is that it's a form of pneumonitis caused by radiation therapy and possibly enhanced by chemo, which of course is very rare and unexpected for the low dose of lung radiation I was getting. That should heal itself over time. The only treatment we could do now is for me to go on oral steroids, but I would have to do that for six months to prevent backlash with tapering, so I probably won't be doing that.

Okay, so here's the bad news: I'm in the hospital again. I was at home recovering from the surgery when Thursday I started having pain in my right side (surgery was on the left). At first I thought it was just a cramp or something, but I had a bit of a fever that night and by morning the pain hadn't gone away. My mom and sister took me into the ER on Friday, where luckily I was one of the first patients in their second floor "holding area" (this was around 12:30pm). They were surprisingly efficient, though my history probably helped expedite things along. I spent the afternoon being wheeled from the second floor down to the different radiology labs (chest X-ray, then ultrasound, then CT). While I was getting the ultrasound, the radiologist came in to tell me there was an abnormal mass in my liver, right where I was having pain. I was baffled. How could this be? Frankly, I'm still baffled. My latest PET-CT on July 16th was clear, and the chest CT I got on August 11th didn't show anything in the section of liver that was captured. I'm not sure anyone knows exactly what this is.

After the CT scan with contrast, the docs told me the mass was hemorrhaging and bleeding. Someone from interventional radiology came to talk to us in the ER, and he recommended that they do an embolization procedure to stop the bleeding. Although my bloodwork didn't indicate that the mass was bleeding quickly, its location made them worry that if it were to grow and protrude outside of the liver pocket, it could become pretty dangerous. They would do the embolization as a catheter-based procedure, entering an artery in the groin and navigating into the liver to deliver the embolizing agent that would stop the bleeding. It's funny - the application of my research focuses on these kinds of procedures (except I was focused on the heart) - so a nerdy part of me was excited to experience the procedure myself.


Embolization Nation

Things went pretty quickly after that; they wheeled me from the ER to one of the interventional radiology suites with the big C-arm for fluoroscopy (real-time X-ray). There was a bit of a discussion as to whether I was going to get any "sleepy" medication, since I had had a banana a few hours before and they usually want people to have nothing to eat or drink six hours beforehand. Luckily they decided it was okay to give me something. I was awake for the whole thing but definitely felt better being a little woozy rather than wide awake. After the burn of the numbing medication the procedure was relatively painless. . . that is until they actually embolized the thing. Right after they finished the procedure I started feeling this awful burning sensation in my abdomen and had a huge wave of nausea.


ICU, Do UC Me?

Afterwards they took me to the Intensive Care Unit (never stayed there before), where you'd think things would be calmer than other places. No such luck. First, I was in intense pain. They gave me a PCA (Patient-Controlled Analgesia) button which allows you to inject yourself with pain medication up to every 15 minutes. My PCA had hydromorphone, which is supposed to be 10x stronger than morphine. In addition, I was allowed to get Fentinol, but really it was only the Fentinol that seemed to help, and that would wear off after 10 minutes or so. Plus they could only give me 100-mg an hour, and it took about that much to really impact the pain at all. So basically I was getting about 10 minutes of real relief every hour.

I guess one of the benefits of the ICU is that you get one nurse per two people, so you have a lot of attention. The problem is that there are four beds to a room, and although I was somewhat of an anomaly there (I think they only put me there because of my medical history and because they wanted to keep close track to make sure the bleeding was stopped), the rest of the patients were not. One of the the four of us was totally quiet, so no issues there. Or at least, I didn't hear anything from him. One of the patients was pretty quiet, but not responsive, so the nurses had to literally yell out instructions to him over and over again throughout the night. Finally, my neighbor had become delirious with pain medication and had started refusing to take medication, wouldn't stay motionless for his bed-side X-ray, and was generally becoming a huge challenge for the nursing team. In any case, that night was a total disaster from a pain and quiet standpoint. I have to say I'm impressed that these nurses put up with this stuff on a daily basis.


Back on F-ground again

Luckily, they moved me the next day to good old F-ground (oncology ward), where apparently all the cancer patients have gotten better or something, because there's nobody here. I'm told it's been a slow week - there are tons of empty beds and they've even been sending nurses home because they're not needed. I have a pretty nice room with bed by the window and no roommate. The room faces a courtyard and the roof of the opposing building appears to be where the helicopter pad for the hospital is. The helicopters do a lot of business on Saturdays, it seems.

Yesterday I was still in a good amount of pain and pretty drugged up. I had a bad fever through the night and was feeling pretty crappy this morning. The oncology team decided to put me on antibiotics just in case, but the IR doc came by and helped explain what was going on. He said it was very common after these embolization procedures to develop post-embolization syndrome, which apparently consisted of fevers and nausea. He said it was probably not due to an infection, but that it was a good idea to take something to reduce the fever. He suggested taking ibuprofen rather than tylenol, since tylenol can have some liver toxicity (which is usually a problem for people getting these procedures). Apparently this was the best idea ever, since after I took an ibuprofen this afternoon my fever broke and my pain started subsiding. Could be coincidence, but what the hey, we'll take it. In any case I'm feeling a lot more awake now than I was before, too.

I was scheduled to have an appointment with my medical oncologist tomorrow, but I guess that may not happen exactly as planned. She's leaving for sabbatical on Tuesday, though, so she said she'd definitely come to see me if I were still in the hospital. I'm a little apprehensive to see her leave, but hopefully the new doctor I'll be seeing lives up to her good reputation.

Hopefully my next post will be out of the hospital and will have more answers about this liver business.