What's Up With the Doc 47? - Technology Fails Me

3/25/09

Well, it's been an interesting couple of days. I showed up at the hospital at 8 am yesterday to have my preprocedure blood drawn, at which point they told me the CT scanner was down and they'd have to reschedule my biopsy. This upset me more than I expected - it's rescheduled for Friday, no big deal, but I guess I had done more mental and emotional preparation than I knew. Then the blood test results came back and my anemia is much worse than it has been. Which, yay!, something to explain feeling so draggy and something that can be treated but what a pain it was to get the transfusion organized for my work hospital. I had to get an order from a physician on staff (my oncologist doesn't have privileges here) which was no big deal because there is an oncologist here who has bent over backwards to do anything I need for me but the fax machine in the Ambulatory Medical Center (where they give the blood) was not working and it took them an hour to actually get the orders AFTER I got there so I wound up in the AMC for >4 hours for ONE unit yesterday so I have to block off my clinical schedule and go back for the second unit today.

CT scanner and fax machine failures - all it took to complicate my life unnecessarily.

Overall I'm feeling OK. Mild nausea, mild left hip pain, moderate neck pain, no fever. Mostly I'm tired of this whole deal, but it's still better than the alternative.

Chris and Sheri get here tomorrow and we head to Long Island for my last volleyball tournament of the season on Friday evening. Next chemo is scheduled for next Tuesday. I'm going to try premedicating with the Aleve on day 8 to try to avoid the fever starting on day 9. Scan April 14th, Dana-Farber April 16 so I should know what the next months hold for me by the end of April at the latest.