A Rough Few Days: Extreme Nausea From Chemotherapy
I feel like a bear stumbling around after winter hibernation even though it’s only been three days. As I’ve been reporting, I always seem to have some level of nausea. It was a little worse when I went in for my first Gemzar on Tuesday but I was otherwise fine and knew they’d be giving me something for nausea IV before the chemo, so we went ahead. Half way through the chemo I threw up what appeared to be everything that had gone into my stomach that day.
They held the chemo, gave me some fluids and more antinausea meds then finished the chemo. However, That was far from the end of the story. I threw up twice more - once as soon as I got home and once with my 10 pm medications and then had diarrhea for most of the evening/night. My temperature never got above 100. Wednesday I basically didn’t make it out of bed except to go to the bathroom. Things finally started to improve yesterday afternoon after I took some Compazine (old school antinausea medicine) and I actually managed some dinner last night.
Even though this started during chemo, I don’t think it had anything to do with chemo. I actually think I had a viral gastroenteritis, so I plan to go about my business and give the Gemzar another go in two weeks. My oncologist and I are talking about pain and nausea control (the opiates may certainly be contributing to the constant low grade nausea) so we may try messing with those a bit, although my pain is very well controlled right now and I’m a bit nervous about changing any of that up.
Other than that, everything is status quo. My vital signs and blood counts were fine on Tuesday. I manged to get in to work for a few hours yesterday and aim for the same today. We have a quiet weekend planned before the insanity of a new school year hits next week.
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