Lisa's redness is about the same as yesterday, but her swelling continues to get noticeably worse. We saw the infectious disease specialist this morning, and he said that he believes that it is not an infection issue (not cellulitis) but an inflammation problem coming from fibrosis or scarring in either the lymphatic or venous system in that area most likely caused by the past radiation treatment. However, because Lisa has some many different things going on, including how chemo can either magnify or mask symptoms, he is putting Lisa on 7 to 10 days of intravenous infusions of antibiotics. These will have to be twice a day, so a nurse came to our home this evening to train me how to administer them, and we were surprised to find out that Lisa can actually do it herself if she wants to. In any case, we're glad this can be done at home since it's certainly preferable to Lisa having to be in the hospital for the treatments.

After seeing the infectious disease specialist, we went to see the medical oncologist. He disagrees that it was caused by the radiation treatment, considering the relatively low dose used in that area, but does agree that it's good to rule out infection by doing the intravenous antibiotics. The scheduled chemo treatment for this week has been rescheduled to next week. As long as Friday's CT scan doesn't show any new problems or surprises, also next week he wants Lisa to start going for lymphedema therapy starting on Monday, which includes some specialized massage to move the fluid out of the affected area back into other unaffected parts of the body when it can be properly processed and eliminated, and potentially some compression garments for the problem leg.

Other "activities" scheduled for next week include an appointment with a vascular surgery specialist, a chemo treatment, and back to the infectious diseases specialist.