Slight crash and burn and now recovery

Hi all-

Mom ended up being able to receive her 11 pm dose last night (9 doses! that's incredible for cycle 2!) but that at least partially put her over the edge. While she has yet to display any of the neurotoxicity symptoms this round (which is great as those were some of the hardest side effects for her to deal with), her blood pressure crashed last night around 2 am to something like 60 something over 30 something. The boluses of saline did nothing to fix it so the big gun BP drug was brought out.

While this is obviously a serious complication and a little hairy at the time, it's pretty much expected/par for the course for IL-2 and the nurses are all prepped and able to handle it. By 6:30 this morning her BP was back up to 97/40 something and by 10 am they were working on weaning her back off the BP medicine.

Given her drastic reaction to that last dose and the fact that she's already had as many doses as she had last cycle she's likely done for now. (She didn't have the 7 am dose and won't get the 3 pm dose.) I suppose if all her blood work miraculously improved over the course of the day they might try one last 11 pm dose, but her Dr is satisfied with what she's received and doesn't want to push her body too far. He also told her that the blood pressure crash, though scary and not pleasant for her to go through, was actually a good indication that her body's immune system was responding to the IL-2 as you would want it to. While nothing is certain until we see the scans in a month, there have been lots of little signs that things hopefully are reacting/working.

So..for now she's spending the day trying to recover. Her BP needs to stabilize enough that she can sit/stand/move without dizziness or risk of fall, her electrolytes and other blood work numbers need to start trending back in the right direction, and her diarrhea needs to resolve enough that we can manage it with home care. On top of all that she's fairly zombie-like from sleep deprivation and is having trouble not slurring because her mouth is so dry (and she's tired and her creatinine levels are too high). But she's all there...totally unlike this time last cycle.

If things resolve as folks would like she'll come back to our place tomorrow to rest/recover. If not, she should like be released on Sunday.

We'll keep you posted.