Complicated

Good Morning All:

Trying to get a quick update in before I head out to Hopkins this AM. As I wrote in my most recent posts, I am continuing to go to daily appointments at Hopkins to treat a couple of infections--one in my catheter and another that appears to be the beginnings of pneumonia. No one at Hopkins seems terribly alarmed by either so I will continue to take my cues from them.

As it turns out, just before leaving Hopkins on Tuesday my nurse noticed a change in my catheter site and called over the charge nurse. After a brief consult they decided that my catheter was starting to slide out of place and that it would need to be replaced. Yesterday I had a long day at Hopkins capped off by the minor surgical procedures to pull out the old catheter and replace it with a new one.

While it makes perfect sense to me, the nurses looked at me as if I had sprouted a third arm when I suggested that getting a new catheter makes short work of the infection that had grown in the old one. In fact, I'm going to Hopkins today and the only item on the agenda is for me to receive the antibiotic treatment for the catheter infection . . . strikes me as odd, but what do I know.

I still have the tell-tale cough from the pneumonia and I'll be getting a follow up CT Scan tomorrow to see if how treatment of that condition is going. We are still looking at a Sunday or Monday admission date if the platelets cooperated. Since I was undergoing some surgery yesterday I received an unexpected boost to my platelet count in the form of a transfusion (so I didn't bleed to death)--we'll see if my body welcomes the new platelets and builds on that count or if they begin to dwindle due to infection, lingering chemo, etc.

--Russ.