Yesterday was a long day of doctors and treatments. Our regular radiation oncologist had to be gone for some meeting, and he had his assistant fill in. His assistant is a very nice doctor, but she's a general practitioner and neither a cancer specialist nor a radiation specialist and not familiar with Lisa's case other than what she can read from the file so she wasn't able to answer any of Lisa's questions, which was rather frustrating. Today Lisa has chemo infusion, Ethyol injection, and radiation treatment (which happens every Wednesday during this 7 week series), and we're scheduled to see the primary oncologist so we'll ask him some of those same questions that aren't radiation specific.
Lisa was feeling poorly both before and after radiation, with chest pain and a feeling like the SVC Syndrome symptoms may be returning. It got worse as the evening got later. She's still sleeping this morning as I write this, so I don't know if they've improved overnight yet.
Update: We spent a little over 5 hours at the cancer center today with lab work, doctors, nurses, techs and treatments. One of the reasons that Lisa probably feels more poorly lately is that her bloodwork shows that she is anemic and has low iron, almost certainly an effect of the treatments. The doctor wants to give her an iron infusion using INFed on Friday, which is at least a 4 hour treatment. Less than 1% of patients have a bad reaction to it, but to ensure Lisa isn't one of them, they start with a small 15 minute infusion, watching her closely during that time, and then monitor her for another 45 minutes to make sure she's ok. If there are no problems, then a 3 hour infusion follows to finish it off. Afterwards, she'll have the usual daily dose of radiation, finishing off Week 3, with four weeks to go.
Michael
