2020 March Update

As I sit here typing my update on my health I feel it wouldn’t be right to leave out the pandemic we are experiencing with the coronavirus. People are dying all over the world from this horrible virus, doubling confirmed cases by the day, and businesses are shutting their doors. Social distancing of 6 ft away is recommended yet medical staff are still at the bedside and sometimes without appropriate personal protective equipment like the N95 masks. I’m fortunate for many reasons as a nurse in the field I am in, the hospital I work for, and as a patient. My hospital first is not a hub to hold the confirmed patients. My unit is a clean unit due to the immunocompromised newborns. So we likely will not deal directly with a confirmed case. We have restricted visitors to only the banded support person. That’s it. Everyone is screened at the front doors and in other areas of the hospital there are no visitors allowed. All elective surgeries are cancelled. Doctor offices are closing their doors or if they are open are not allowing anyone other than the patient inside. Everyone goes through a screening before allowed in. Do you have a fever? A cough? Have you traveled outside the US? And you are required to wash your hands with germ x or purel. With that said, at work they have removed all gloves from the bedside and al purel from the rooms. Patients had been stealing our supplies. If a patient is a PUI (person under investigation) they will be tested as if they have the virus until confirmed then shipped out to Tomball or another hub. It is a tedious process to don and doff the PPE (gowns, gloves, face masks, shields). We do not have enough supplies and they have implemented someone in the hospital who is checking out equipment for each nurse for each patient use and checks it back in at the end of the shift. It’s so crazy to see us in this medical crisis. My educator for women’s services is from NYC and said her nurse friends there who normally work with babies in the NICU are now at the bedside on the medical units helping with the coronavirus patients. Nurses are given a quick training session on how to use the vents, something that usually takes months of training in. They are all expected to care for the ICU critical patients. It’s scary for your health as a nurse and your license. 

So my health...which is what this blog is suppose to really be about anyways is kind of concerning to me as a stage four cancer patient. I had scans done last week and they found a 9mm lymph node in my right axilla or armpit. I was sent for an ultrasound yesterday to confirm and yes it was seen. They ended up trying to do a core needle biopsy but the lymph node is too deep and even a long spinal needle would not reach it to give adequate tissue samples. So now I’m waiting to be sent to interventional radiology to try to get a biopsy there. I also had a brain MRI yesterday for some weird headaches I had been having. They wake me up out of a dead sleep and my pain is a stabbing pain behind my eyes and frontal lobe of my brain( forehead). This has happened 10 times maybe in the night and upon rising in the past month so we decided I should be scanned. The other thing new was on the chest CT last week there shows a new nodule, less than a centimeter on the right lung in the pleural lining. Will keep an eye on it but it’s too small to test or treat right now. And then my right shoulder or humoral head has a 3mm sclerotic lesion that hasn’t changed in size over the last three scans. It’s so small it doesn’t pick up on the bone scan. But the Ct scan does show it. My doctor is very confident even with spots popping up in scans, that they are being controlled and staying small for now with the hormone blocker medication I take, Femara. He doesn’t see that we need to add an oral chemo just yet. I, on the other hand am concerned that I have cancer lurking around in my body. As a stage four patient spots are going to pop up. We just need to control how fast. And that we do by chasing the spots with medication that can buy us time. The last thing we want is to be naive about a symptom I’m having or not change treatment in a timely manner. Like I’ve said, it’s not IF the cancer will come back, it’s WHEN. It’s in my lymph nodes and we knew that back in 2014 with my initial diagnose. The lymph nodes are compared to a super highway. Once in there cancer can go wherever the hell it wants. I’ve been fortunate this far in the fact mine has landed in places in my spine that were able to be treated with targeted radiation. Those spots are stable right now. I’m having no neurological deficits with it being so close to my spinal cord. That’s great news! The new spots are small and we will continue to scan every three months to watch them closely. For now, the doctor wants to know what the enlarged lymph node is about so I will do as I’m told and give the biopsy another try.