Carrie has had a rough last couple of days. I went out of town to Atlanta on Wednesday to present at a conference for the Vet School. When I left Carrie Wednesday morning, she was having slight stomach problems, mainly feeling bloated and her abdomen was just tender to the touch. She said it kind of reminded her of how her stomach was feeling last summer before everything was diagnosed, but we were hoping it would go away quickly. Throughout the day, she starting experiencing a little stiffness in her chest and soreness in her back. She took a couple of pain medications and went to bed early wednesday night, and when she woke up thursday, her stomach was feeling much better, but her body was aching and she was running a temperature of around 99.0. She rested all day and her friend Pat from work called to check on her and when she found out Carrie wasn't feeling spectacular, she insisted on going over to our house, cooking her homemade chicken soup, and taking care of her (Thank you Pat!!) Carrie still felt cruddy and her temp got up to 100.1 a couple of different times. Her oncologist had told her if her temp ever got about 100.5 to call her or the nurse and even though it wasn't quite that high, Carrie went ahead and called to tell them what's going on. She finally heard back from the nurse just after 5 PM and he said Carrie needed to go to the ER to get checked out because of her symptoms and just to be sure she didn't have any kind of infection or anything else wrong. I was still in ATL so Pat took Carrie to the ER about 6:30 and got her signed in and registered (they gave her a hospital mask as soon as she walked in). She got called back to a room about 8:30 and luckily she had a private room. They quickly started an IV and took some blood and had her collect a urine sample. They also came in to do a chest XRAY to see if maybe she had pneumonia. Those tests took about 2 hours to get the results back, all of which came back okay. No pneumonia!! And her counts were fairly decent. Not great, but for someone going through chemo, they were at a healthy level. After the doctor came in to see her around 9:45, he said they probably would issue a CT scan based on her history to see if the tumor had developed somewhere that was causing the problems. THEN around 10:45 PM a radiology tech came in with a 30 oz. cup of lemonade tasting contrast dye to take for the CT scan. He told her to drink the whole cup (which Carrie said tasted HORRIBLE) then it would have to sit in her system for about 1 & 1/2 hour before they could do the scan. Soooo..... they finally pulled her to get the scan around 12:15 AM. Then she had to wait about another hour to get the results. The doctor came in and said the scan didn't show anything they weren't already expecting and didn't appear to be causing any problems that could be causing Carrie's symptoms. He wanted to go ahead and call her oncologists' office and speak to the on-call doctor just to make sure they didn't need to do anything else before they let her go. So FINALLY around 2:15 AM or so, they came back and said they talked to the on-call doctor and said they didn't see any reason for her to have to stay or be admitted to the hospital so she could finally go home. The on-call doctor in Bham said he would have her oncologist call friday afternoon to check on her and see how she's doing.
I'm back from Atlanta now and Carrie seems to be having a much better day. She took some more pain medication last night before she went to bed and that seemed to take care of her headache and a lot of her other pain. Her temp was 97.3 this morning so no fever so far! Overall, she's feeling much better today. We're thinking maybe she just got a virus that was causing her symptoms, but she seems to be improving. So after spending 8 hours in the ER to find out nothing was particularly wrong, at least now we have somewhat of a peace of mind. We'll keep you updated if anything changes or if her doctor says anything different.
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