Anna came home on Tuesday morning as planned. She had a few decent days at home, but had been feeling pretty crummy. On Friday night, she started coming down with a low-grade fever (in the 99.x) range. On Saturday morning, the fever spiked to around 100.7, and anything over 100.4 meant that she was likely to be admitted. She called the on-call Oncologist, and he told her to head over to the ER. This was somewhat expected, given that with her chemo cycle she hits a low point about 7-10 days after the initial treatment (this was about day 8).
At this point, the luggage is normally out and the bag is mostly packed anyways so it doesn’t take too long to get out of the house. My parents were there, so we were able to sneak out without too much TJ drama. The ER was pretty quick at getting her into a room, but at first the room didn’t have a bed. They wanted to put her in isolation, given that she is a high risk for infection. After a little bit the bed arrived and they started with the process.
It’s kind of annoying that you have to go through ER, as it’s much easier to get admitted through the Cancer Center, and we knew that she wasn’t just there to get checked out. The ER folks are nice, but they aren’t really down with the program. After the Doctor said it’d be a few hours to run some blood cultures (which we know only takes a few minutes), and that they’d have to find a nurse certified to access Anna’s port, which I don’t think the certification even exists, and even if the certification does exist, the fact that they needed to find one, didn’t make us real comfortable… we decided we’d start to reach out to some folks and get the process moving along. Anna reached out to a couple of her nurse friends from 5300 (Oncology unit) to give them a heads up that we were coming.
I sent a txt message to primary Doctor, Dr. Grossman. He wasn’t on call, but he called me back within 10 minutes. The only reason it took 10 minutes, was that he first called 5300 to get a bed lined up. He gave me the rundown of what he was going to do (ie. put her on antibiotics; have the on call doctor come by, etc). We hung up and then Dr. Grossman called the ER to put in the orders for the antibiotics. Within 2 minutes, we heard the charge nurse in the ER giving the instructions to the ER doctor out in the hall. It felt great knowing that Grossman was all over this, and we weren’t in the hands of just the ER folks. Then to top it off, the ER doctor came back in to give us another story about how he was waiting to hear back, and at that exact moment Grossman called my cell phone to check back in. It was great to be able to turn to the ER doctor, and say “if you need Grossman, I have him right here”.
We had our marching orders, and next up was the ER nurse to access Anna’s port. Anna was a bit nervous about this, and was really hoping they’d just do that up in 5300. This nurse was very sweet, but you could tell she was kind of nervous. I kind of suspect this was one of those things she did ages ago in college, and then never really thought about it again. As she was going through it, she was kind of reading the instructions and made a few little “oops” types mistakes. All in all, she actually did a nice job, but I think it got everyone more nervous than we need.
After starting meds and a short wait, she was moved up to 5300. In a prior post, I mentioned how there was a specific room, call it 53xx, that was generally the last stop. They also take another room and reserve it for the family of 53xx. When we walked in, I noticed the sign on that room had changed, which meant that the person in 53xx was no longer there. Even though we didn’t know the person, it still made me a little sad.
I wasn’t sure who was going to be working, as sometimes the weekend staff has a few floater nurses, but there were at least seven friendly faces of people that we were familiar with. It felt great to see everyone when we walked in. The transport person asked one of the nurses “who has her”, meaning who was Anna’s nurse, and a familiar voice shouted out “we all have her”. It really felt nice, as I knew that they really all did have her and that she was in good hands. It really did feel like we were back home again.
The afternoon/evening was pretty quiet. She started on a few different meds and received platelets. She managed to have a reasonable dinner, which is always a good sign. The fever had been hanging right around 100.8, but hopefully will come down a bit. We’ll know more in a day or two, but as of now this looks like just a normal infection that can be treated.
I wanted to give a special thank you to her doctors and nurses. It’s so awesome that I can reach her primary doctor anytime I need him, and the nurses all swarm around to help Anna. We really are fortunate to have found these fine people. Thanks everyone!