IM: WHUSDJ
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Bluegrass Rules
Cody Lee is a WHUS family member who was recently diagnosed with Non-Hodgekins Lymphoma. He has decided to keep everyone up-to-date with his experience by occasional postings on WHUS.org. Cody joined WHUS in the summer of 2010 and is currently a sophomore at UConn. If you'd like to get in touch with him, you can email him here. Follow Cody's posts here.
This will be a quick summary of what has happened since Friday night.
Friday April 1st, 2011-
During the day, my chemo reaction was bad, but I needed to put on a cooling blanket and ice packs before they could give me the transfusion I needed. This only made my cough worse, which made my headache worse. They decided it would be good to give me a chest x-ray to see if my lungs were still clear. Everything was going well, and my temperature went away long enough for the transfusion. When my coughing had gone away, and I was taking it easy, my mom came in and asked if I wanted to hear the most recent news. It turns out, my chest x-ray did not come back clear, and I had gotten pneumonia. This had me very concerned as secondary infections are never good, but I decided it would be best to just get some sleep.
Saturday April 2nd, 2011-
I woke up with a huge fit of coughing and a headache again. The weekend oncologist came in, and I asked him how dangerous this was, as I had heard it's extremely bad to have secondary infections. He told me to stop reading medical information on the internet. He said I should be able to recover within a week, and I would only be in big trouble if my blood pressure dropped too much, in which case I'd be at risk for congestive heart failure. He left, and most of the day was alright, aside from the one idiotic nurse I had who didn't listen to a thing I said about which medications do and don't work for me, and ended up making me go into coughing fits several times during her shift. There was also the issue of moving. I had been on oxygen since the night before, and I had to take the oxygen off to get out of bed. This resulted in dizziness, coughing and more headaches. Aside from this, I did very well. That night, I had some issues when I started to sleep, but nothing too bad.
Sunday April 3rd, 2011-
This morning, I woke up feeling fine and was optimistic that I was getting better. They decided to take me in for a chest x-ray to verify this. The x-ray went well, as we had figured out how to move me without too much discomfort. When the results came back, I was told it was getting worse and that I would need to go to the Critical Care Unit. I slept most of the day after that, until they finally moved me. Once I arrived at my current room, I saw a new doctor. She informed me that my lungs are filled with too much fluid, and being on oxygen is no longer enough. We discussed options, and this is what will happen. Tonight, I will be getting platelets to prevent me from bleeding during my procedure. When the transfusion of platelets is half done, they're going to sedate me, and intubate me. They are also going to give me a tube to feed me though. I'm getting one other tube, but I won't go into that here. The plan is to not wake me up until the pneumonia is gone, which they still hope will take a week or less. Because of this, I won't be able to post for a while and I wanted to get this out there quick.
I'll inform you all once I wake up, and let you know how I'm doing.