Todd's Journey

The story of my cancer journey

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Update on upcoming surgery.

- Posted in The Journey by with comments

Had a very good conversation this afternoon with Dr. Morash, who is my Urological Oncologist and Primary lead in my Cancer treatment journey.

He believes there are a few possibilities as to why my creatinine levels are going up. One may be the stents, two it may be the antibiotic I am taking called Trimethoprim, or three it may be the immunotherapy itself that is causing the rise.

The simplest thing to do right now is to replace the stents and see if that improves drainage from the kidney to the bladder, ultimately reducing my creatinine levels.

If the stent replacement does not work, we will try removing the Trimethoprim and see if that reduces the creatinine levels.

If that doesn't work, then we may have to look at going back to nephrostomy tubes. Which could end up being a permanent requirement. But that decision is still a little ways down the road.

I am hopeful we won't have to go back to the nephrostomy tubes, as it severely affects my quality of life and makes travel something of the past for me.

We will see after Thursday if the creatinine is coming down.

Will keep you posted.

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.

Urinary bladder training

- Posted in Medical Update by with comments

For those of you who are asking me about how my bladder training is going, I am currently up to almost 2 and a half hours between urges to urinate.

I continue to try and allow more urine to sit in my bladder before going to the washroom so that my bladder will learn to expand a bit and understand it can hold more urine than it thinks.

The ends of the ureteral stents in my bladder do not seem to be irritating me as much, and there is now very little pain associated with urination.

So all in all, much improvement on that front. I will keep at the bladder training for a while still.