Bad Blood – A Short Delay
This might be the only blog post on the Internet that’s not about T Swizzle. By “bad blood” I mean that my actual blood in my actual body is bad. It’s anemic and my hemoglobin is waaaaay too low. This whole time I’ve been so worried about my white count and if it would get so low it would delay my chemo schedule. So, there I was, at the hospital for my very first Herceptin-only “maintenance” infusion. Feeling like a recent grad visiting her old high school during the first week of school. You know, feeling pretty good. Maybe a little smug. My appetite had just returned and I’d had sushi for every meal for two days. (Except breakfast of course, because I don’t do breakfast. Breakfast food is beyond delightful. It’s eating it in the morning that I object to.)
Anyway I get in there for my appointment that’s supposed to last 30 minutes. And I discover that Dr. Cap has snuck me onto his schedule. “He probably wants to yell at me about my magnesium,” I groaned to the nurses. (NOTE: Dr. Cap doesn’t “yell.” He might actually be incapable of raising his voice.) I can’t remember if I wrote about this before, but my magnesium was wicked low right before my last round of chemo so Cap put me on 800 milligrams a day of the stuff. And I was really good about taking it. And YET this was not reflected in my blood panel! How, I asked, could I be ingesting two 400 mg tablets of that crap every day and it not show up in my blood?! Cap told me to eat magnesium-rich foods. Well, at that point I wasn’t eating jack shit, so I just kept taking the pills and took long baths in magnesium sulfate (bath salts, baby) which I’d read that you can absorb through the skin.
Now, I’ve been anemic for basically ever, which doesn’t make sense to me. I eat red meat. The only veggies I like are the green ones. There’s no frickin’ reason for me to be anemic, but I am. I was a decade ago, I was while pregnant with Allison, I was 18 months ago at my regular doctor, and I have been throughout chemo. Everyone and their dog told me to take iron pills. And I ignored them because they upset my stomach and clog up the works. If you know what I’m saying. Hashtag no poop. Anyway, I wasn’t worried about it, but apparently I should have been.
Because Dr. Cap told me that my hemoglobin was too low for surgery. *sad trombone* To tell you the truth, I wasn’t even sure what the hell hemoglobin was. My first thought was a Spider-Man villain. Apparently that’s not quite right. It is “the iron-containing oxygen-transport metalloprotein in the red blood cells.” It looks like the fourth of July!
Dr. Cap said we should delay surgery for a few weeks and I needed to start taking the iron supplements seriously. He told me that the official call on surgery belonged to Dr. Supe (my surgeon), but with hemoglobin that low (7.5 if you’re curious. Normal range is 11.3-15.5) it just wasn’t safe. He told me that if the iron supplements didn’t raise my levels we’d have to give me someone else’s blood. Yikes. So I’m taking the dang iron pills and they suck. But I take them twice a day. Surgery has been rescheduled for October 8.
The good news is that my heart is just fine. This is confirmed by an EKG and an echocardiogram. There wasn’t any damage from the Herceptin.
A couple days after starting to take the iron (and more than three weeks passing since my last chemo!) I had an excellent day. I felt good. I ate food. I had energy and did a bunch of housework. I did, however, have a bit of a meltdown at the party store. Gunny and I went to get a Harry Potter costume for Allison and I found this cool pink lady wig.
Bee tee dubs it looks like dogshit on me. I have olive skin and it doesn’t go with pale pink. 😦
Now that it’s Halloweentime, all the cool wigs are out and since I’ve got barely a hint of stubble on about 1/3 of my head, it looks like hat and wig city for a good while. I said something to the cashier about how the wig was for me and blah blah bald head and she told me she’d had breast cancer twice. They’d missed something the first time and she got more lumps and had to go through all the treatment again. “You’re going to be okay,” she told me. And I got all teary-eyed. And I asked her “Are you able to make plans for the future?” and as I said this, I lost it and started crying and–thanks Herceptin Drip–my nose ran right onto my shirt. She leaned across the counter and hugged me. “It’s going to be okay,” she said. “I promise. I swear to God it’s going to be okay.” Then she gave me her phone number and said to call her if I wanted to talk.
You just never know when you’re going to break. And I don’t know if I was crying because of cancer and future and will I EVER have peace of mind or because Antoinette at Everything Party reached out to me with kindness when she didn’t have to. BTW she told me that it took her a while, but now she is able to think about and plan for a future.
School has started again, and with the homework packets and library books, Allison brought home the first cold of the season. In the old days, pre-Cancer, everyone would get sick to some degree while I would have a half-day of sore throat and then be fine. My immune system was a rockstar. Well, no more. I got pretty sick. Not go-to-the-doctor sick, but sick enough to stay in bed and watch Columbo episodes on Netflix. I’m feeling better now, but that cough/cold knocked me on my butt for a few days–and just when I was feeling good again!
I don’t have to go back to the doctor until the first week of October for a pre-op consult with Dr. Supe, and then my Herceptin action the next day. So in the meantime I will concentrate on whipping my blood into shape, getting Glitched out in paperback, and maybe perhaps I hope doing some work on my next Lexy story which I haven’t touched since July 7.
