The story of my cancer journey
I have pretty much recovered from my immunotherapy reaction over the weekend. The small dose steroids I was given seemed to help a lot. I have my appetite back, am holding down my food, no fever, and no chills or rigors.
We'll have to see what, if anything, the Oncologist will do with my next immuno session. They may just add the small dose steroids to help prevent recurrence of the reaction.
Will keep you posted.
Well, it's been almost 6 months since Jamie and I have had to go to Emergency on a weekend (or day for that matter) but that streak came to a halt on Saturday. I appear to have been having another reaction to my immunotherapy session on Friday. All afternoon Friday, I was feeling cold, fatigued and had abdominal pain. I had no appetite, and was fairly nauseous.
This continued through the night. Saturday morning I woke up with more intense symptoms, plus I had a fever. We went to Emergency shortly after lunch where they put me on strong antibiotics as a precaution, and ran a whole slew of tests. Most of my bloodwork came back fairly normal, and they ruled out septis.
The ER doctors contacted Oncology at the Ottawa General Hospital who reviewed the symptoms and blood work and concluded that I was having a reaction to the last immunotherapy session.
He explained that the immunotherapy can mimik an infection, and even cause a fever. All of my symptoms were signs of an infection, so it was imperative of me to go into ER. Once they had determined it was a reaction, they gave me some steroids to take for a few days, which made me feel much better.
I am pretty much back to normal today, but our streak of staying out of ER on the weekends finally came to an end.