Temporary Break

In today's good news/bad news update:

Mom had a really, really rough time Wed night with the digestive and blood pressure side effects taking center stage. As a result by the morning her electrolytes were really out of whack and her blood pressure had fallen to as low as 85/42 (the major/common impact that IL-2 has).

Based on that the docs decided to hold off on her 7 am dose to give her body a little time to recover. Over the next 8 hours her vital signs came bouncing back (she was back up to 115 or so over 70 or so) and she started feeling a little better and more alert etc. When they reran her labs at 2 they decided that though the vitals were back fine, they still weren't totally happy with her sodium or other electrolyte levels and decided to hold the 3 pm dose too. By the time I left at 4:30 Mom had perked up a bunch (it's a amazing how quickly you start to show some recovery without the IL-2 in your system).

Our hope is that the 9 pm labs will look good enough that she will receive her 11 pm dose and go back to feeling lousy again tomorrow.

Current metrics: Received 8 of 10 doses. Her goal/hope is to end up with 10 of 14. Wish her luck.

Only 24 more hours of treatment to go. Then they'll watch her for 12 hours or so and then start thinking of releasing her to our house to recover before she goes home with friends to Corvallis.

Then two weeks later it's back for a second cycle. And unfortunately it sounds like on cycle 2 you pretty much jump into it with Wed/Thus-level symptoms.

This break was good for her today. Hopefully she can have one more day of attacking these tumors before celebrating the end of Cycle 1.

Wish her luck!

B