Todd's Journey

The story of my cancer journey

Two more infections

- Posted in Medical Update by with comments

As you know, I ended up in Emergency over the weekend, feeling very weak, not eating, dehydrated, abdominal pain and not well overall. They thought I might be septic, so ran a bunch of tests on me, while giving me antibiotics just in case I had an infection.

The on-call Oncologist felt that the symptoms I had were more indicative of a reaction to the immunotherapy session. After some steroids I felt much better and was sent home.

While I was at the hospital they did a blood culture and urine culture to check for potential infections. Both results came back today showing I did have infections in both my blood and my urine. But the strain of infections were different. The infection in my blood is a more commonly known Staph infection that some of us naturally carry and is known to be a contaminate often in blood cultures. The urine infection is often related to a urinary tract infection, although I do not have many other symptoms of a UTI.

Nonetheless, the Doctors are now looking at what antibiotics they can put me on to fight these infections, and trying to determine if the infections are coincidence or a result of the immunotherapy (which can temporarily cause my immune system to ignore certain infections as it fights other diseases).

All in all I feel ok, and not sick at all. Will keep you posted as to what progress I make on the infection front.