We celebrated Mother’s Day with my mother-in-law a week late. We drove up north and took her out to a fancy dinner. During dinner, while just sitting and eating my food, I passed out. No standing up. No walking. Just steakin’. And it happened twice! One minute I’m getting about three-quarters of the way through my steak, and the next minute it’s gone! (They’d taken it to box it up for me to take home).

It happened again on the ride home, so we went in to Urgent Care to get me checked out. My heart was fine, and my blood counts were A-OK. The doctor on duty decided I ought to start an anti-seizure medication, Keppra, to see if it helps.

Well, since then I’ve noticed a marked decrease in the number of spells that I’ve had. I just had intrathecal chemotherapy again today, so we’ll see if that brings them back or not. I’ve been seeing a neurologist that doesn’t buy into the theory that the anti-seizure medications are the cause of the freedom-from-passing-out.

Also! A few weeks ago I had a fever that got as high as 103.1. Once again, we went into Urgent Care so they could test if I was fighting an infection. All of the cultures they did came back negative, which seemed good! But then we heard from my oncologist’s team that they wanted to run a PET scan to see if the fever was a sign that my lymphoma was back! We’ve got that scheduled for a week or two from now. Fortunately, last week the fever disappeared entirely. Gone. I’m pretty sure if the cancer was back, and was causing the fever, it wouldn’t have gone away on its own. And that makes me feel better.

Right around the time that I was dealing with the fever I was hit with a giant helping of fatigue. I could sleep from midnight until 11am, wake up long enough to eat something and take my pills, and then nap until evening. I didn’t have the energy to do much of anything, and it made me grumpy. And being grumpy made me even grumpier! But that’s all starting to pass, too.

Now, with a short nap, I can be a pretty good citizen of the world for most of the day.

Status report: dizzy spells are just about all gone, fever is toast, and fatigue is improving.

Success!

I awoke to intense pain in all of the joints in my legs. Terrible pain like they were broken. But they weren’t; they all moved fine. And thank goodness this was pain that could be pierced by Percocet!

After the second high-dose methotrexate, Saturday morning arrived and the exact same pain returned. The night before saw a walk through the grocery store, but not much more. This time we visited Urgent Care to make sure that nothing was actually going terribly wrong.

X-rays and blood tests looked good. It sounds like arthralgia (like arthritis without the inflammation) can be an occassional side effect of the treatment.

Next time I’ll take Friday night off entirely and see if that changes things.

Getting out of the hospital after that second treatment was a bit stressful. They prescribed that I was to take 25mg of Leucovorin (the Methotrexate antidote) every 6 hours, for nine doses. We checked at the hospital’s pharmacy: out of stock. Group Health? Out of stock, unless we wanted to drive to Tacoma! My dad got on the phone and started calling pharmacies; he found one near our house that had it. The only problem was that they only had it in 5mg tablets! So I got to take 5 pills every 6 hours. It was just a shock that they were discharging my from the hospital without first knowing that I would actually be able to buy my rescue dose.

Also! I had an MRI of my head performed on Wednesday, and Dr Norman has communicated that it looms great. The lymphoma appears to be responding well to the treatment.

In a few weeks we’ll be meeting with a doctor at the SCCA that specializes in transplants to gather a recommendation on next steps after treatment. These lymphomas have shown themselves to be tricky, and it might take a stem-cell transplant to get me a chance of a long-term remission (or even cure).

I was to get my next dose of DepoCyt delivered intrathecally on Friday, but we had to postpone it as I forgot to start the pre-medication (Dexamethasone) on Thursday. For some reason I had started thinking that the Dex was pre-medication for the methotrexate. It turns out that administering DepoCyt without the pre-medication can cause seizures (among other unpleasant side-effects). I’ve started the Dex now and we’ll roll the treatment into the rest of the party on Monday.

Tomorrow we start round three.