I just had the most disorienting experience!
I was feverish much of the day, starting around 11 AM. Fever spikes can occur any time during the seven days of Genasense infusion, and mine went from 101.3, when I first noticed it, to 102.9 a half hour later. I graduated from Tylenol to Advil to get it under control, and it hovered around 100° for the rest of the day.
At 5 PM, wiped out from fever in combination with the heat and humidity of the day, I took some more Advil and lay down in my clothes for a nap. Next thing I knew it was 7 o’clock.
I had slept fourteen hours, and I had missed my nightly Temodar chemotherapy pill!
I put in an off-hours call to my doctor and raced around getting ready for my 9 AM office appointment to draw blood. My doctor, and the nurse who monitors my participation in the program, are both out of town at a conference, so I called and spoke with a covering doctor who isn’t as familiar with the protocol for this trial. He looked into it and determined I should wait until tonight for the next dose. Three days into the program and already I’d flaked out!
I babbled on about sleeping fourteen hours and told him I’d be in the office later today for labs.
“You mean tomorrow,” he said.
“No, today, Thursday,” I said.
“Today’s Wednesday.”
I stared at my “Drug Diary”, still thinking it was morning, and simply could not figure out how I’d stuffed all those hours into the wrong day. I’d written notes about what side effects I had and what drugs I took, but had I made Wednesday up?
Finally I looked out the window and noticed the sun was going down, not up.
Phew... I didn’t miss my dose after all.
2 comments:
Mike had a similar experience quite a few years ago but it had nothing to do with illness. He was in Edmonton, AB which is slightly more North than Ohio. He woke to a room full of sunshine and was in a panic because he was supposed to teach a class at 9:00a. He hurried to dress and went to the training room (in the hotel). To his surprise it was still locked. When he found a clock, he noticed that it was 4:30a.
It is funny how a few hours of sleep can leave us more refreshed than a full night sometimes. :-)
It must be very weird to see sun at 4:30 AM. Or at 10:30 PM, for that matter. And the flip side, the really long nights through the winter months in those northern places, must get pretty depressing.
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