A New Round (and Blog info, Please Read)

Cheryl started on the Taxol and Herceptin this week. We had a very long day at the hospital, we arrived at 9AM and didn't leave until after 5PM. They started the chemo at around 12, and the first drug, Taxol, is a 3 hour treatment. The nurses sat with Cheryl during the first 15 minutes to watch for an allergic reaction, but Cheryl sailed through that round with flying colors. The next treatment, Herceptin, is an 1.5 hour treatment. About an hour in, Cheryl said her hands were cold, and I noticed that her arm was spasming. In the 45 seconds it took the nurse to come over, Cheryl started convulsing, for comparison, think a bad case of the shakes associated with a fever chill. They could intervene, but the nurses said that the patients who had this reaction did better if it could be resolved on its own, and about 50% of the women on this treatment have some sort of reaction, at least on the initial dose. It was decided that given the late hour, and she had received two-thirds of the dose, that it would be OK for her to go home.

Two days out from the treatment, she's still very weak, but only has a small amount of naseua that would be associated from the last treatment. She's also having bouts of fever and muscle aches, which are to expected for this treatment (she also had a shot of the 2nd-generation of ProCrit to boost her red blood cell count which was low this round).

-- Blog Update --
We love all the comments and posts that people are providing, and we encourage you to keep posting, but I'm going to have to manually approve comments from non-registered users. I'm fighting a losing battle against a determined spammer/potential bot master (ask if you don't know, but they're evil) who keeps posting and leaving hidden links that lead to potentially dangerous (for your computer) web pages.

So, comments may not show up for a day after you've posted, but know that we have or will see it and appreciated the thoughts.

Thanks.