Out of the Hospital

[Aside: This blog is way out of date - I'm out of the hospital right now and continuing with treatment, though the drain drama has not quite completed. . . This post was written last week.]


So the docs came in finally on Friday (11/6/09) and said, "well, we really haven't done anything for you in the past four days, so we're thinking we should send you home with the drain and give it some more time." Well that's comforting. I suppose they were right, but it was a little surprising to get such an anticlimactic end to a two-week hospital stay. Essentially, as I said in the previous post, I had been lying around and waiting for the liver drain output to come down. In the meantime, they would replace my potassium or magnesium as I needed it, but for the most part I guess I didn't really need to be in the hospital anymore.

So, I've been hanging out at home again (my sister's) and trying to deal with these continuing fevers. They do seem to be getting better, but at this point it's been 4-5 weeks. I'm pretty ready for them to go away. . .

In the meantime, I talked to my oncologist yesterday (11/9/09), and since we're pretty sure the fevers are not being caused by infection, we're going to continue with chemotherapy, with the original regimen of taxotere and gemcitabine (we couldn't use this at first because of possible bad interactions with radiation). Apparently there are actually numbers for these drugs - 40% chance of response in soft-tissue sarcomas. Still not great odds, but better than nothing. Rhabdo is notorious for not responding to chemo, especially the second time around. We do have a number of possible choices, though, so hopefully one of them will work.