Date Night in the ER

Hi everybody, Jim here. First of all, Linda is fine. In fact everybody is fine, but we did spend 5 hours last night at Christ Hospital's Emergency Room. Ironically, the day itself went really well for Linda. After being off Sutent for 2 days, we were looking forward to her feeling stronger and better, and it seemed to be the case. That morning we went to a different doctor (Internal Medicine) to have her blood pressure looked at and make a recommendation on her BP medication. While we were out, she stopped at a mall to do some Christmas shopping and we even stayed out for lunch after the doctor's appointment.

But by 10 pm Friday night, she had a nose bleed. Now last weekend she was getting a little pink discharge whenever she had to blow her nose (which because of the meds was quite often). This was not unexpected, because one of the many side effects of Sutent we were warned about was bleeding from the nose. No big deal, this was tolerable we thought. Certainly not as bad as high blood pressure. Well, the bleeding got progressively worse as the week went on, but after finishing the first four-week round of Sutent on Wednesday, we figured we were home free and the symptoms would start to subside. Wrong!

To make a long story a little shorter, about 1am the bloodgates opened up, and we had a major mess on our hands. We called the on call Oncologist, and he told us to get down to Christ Hosp and he would let them know we were coming. Then it stopped. We had actually decided not to go, but by 3 am it was really bad again, so off we went. They tried several things to stop the bleeding, and after they checked with the Ear, Nose and Throat specialist, Linda ended up with a 3 in long piece of gauze that had an inflatable tube down the center in her right nostril, which doesn't come out till Monday morning. (Needless to say, Linda vetoed my idea of including a picture with this post.) This was all caused by low platelets in her blood (40,000 instead of a normal 100,000) that prevented her from clotting properly, as we understood it. Again, a direct result of the Sutent. We have to get that checked again on Monday as well, to make sure it's going back up and not down.

As Linda mentioned earlier, on Tuesday we get the CT scan, and the results on Friday, and we'll find out if this was all worth it.

Catch you later. Love,

Jim and Linda

PS-- Cindy, Dale, Joe, Tom, Craig, Larry, Mike---If you read this, Monday's Staff meeting is cancelled.