Update April 14, 2021

 

I was expecting to make a big post today about how great our Wisconsin trip was, how nice it was to see everyone, and thanking everyone for the hospitality and the food - so much food - and give some updates about my little project i was working on the whole time. And i will make that post. But unfortunately first i have a very different update.

 

Amanda started complaining of intense back pain late Saturday night. Sunday morning, as we were preparing to head back to California, it became chest pains. I tried several times to take her to the hospital but she was adamant that we get back to California before we do anything of the sort. This woman is fantastically stubborn. She had an appointment Tuesday morning with her radiation oncologist, Dr. C, which is what we were rushing back for anyway, and she figured she'd just mention it there and if the doctor thought it was anything urgent, she'd go to the hospital. After all, she said this felt exactly like the chest pain she had last year after they placed her port, which i also took her to the hospital for. Last year, they gave her an x-ray, found nothing, and sent her home with painkillers. She assumed this would go the same way.

 

She made the entire trip back suffering from intense pain. I tried to take her to a hospital in Denver also but she would not go.

 

We got home about 11:30 pm on Monday and we were both exhausted, so instead of going to the hospital, we went to bed.

 

At the appointment in the morning, she mentioned the chest pains, and Dr. C immediately pushed us out the door and phoned ahead to the ER that we were coming. She said she almost wanted to call an ambulance, but figured that if we made it from Wisconsin like this, we could make the 4 mile drive to the hospital.

 

Turns out when you show up to a hospital and tell them you have left-side chest pains and difficulty breathing, they barrel you through immediately.

 

After an EKG and a CT scan, they determined that Amanda has a pulmonary embolism - blood clots in the lungs. Due to the chemo and everything else they've done to her body in the last year, Amanda is at a higher risk of developing blood clots, especially while sitting for long periods of time (ie, in a car for three days driving to Wisconsin). They prescribed her blood thinners and referred her to a vascular specialist, whom she will see next week.

 

While we were at the hospital, the news broke that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been linked to some blood clotting issues. We don't think that's what's happening here, since the J&J cases have all been clots in the brain, and have occurred within 3 weeks of getting the shot. Amanda is 4 weeks out from her J&J vaccine, and the clots were all found in her lungs. But that doesn't mean there's no correlation; her doctors are looking into it.

 

The other thing to consider is whether she had a pulmonary embolism last year also, and they just didn't catch it, because they did the wrong scan. Blood clots don't show up on x-rays, a CT scan is required to find them. So that's scary also, that she could have been running around with blood clots in her lungs last year that the doctors just didn't find.

 

So that's where we're at with that now. All the good feelings and emotional recharge from our whole trip just, boom, gone in an instant, and we're back to this harsh reality again. Anyway, i'm still going to make a big post about our trip to thank everyone we saw and apologize to everyone we missed, and talk about my project, but i'm exhausted again and i'll circle back to that later.

 

Thanks everyone. Stay safe.