Some random observations

Hello folks.

First of all, I got another chest-cold.  My darling little son had a runny nose on Mother's Day as I was playing with him at the park, and it was just a matter of time.  I started feeling sick on Tuesday night, and I started taking Tamiflu and Augmentin and I had hopes that it was going to be gone as I felt good yesterday, but today it's gotten worse.  So I will continue to monitor it.

Second, I switched my Velcade to Monday this week because of some potential emergency work travel tomorrow.  With one less day to recover from the last infusion, I'm not surprised my counts were on the suppressed side but they were a bit worse than I thought.  WBC at 2.9, platelets at 108.  HGB was at 14, which is pretty good for me.

Third, I got the Velcade in the morning.  Velcade has some side effects which I've mostly been able to avoid, but they include flu-like symptoms, headache, and fever.  Normally, I take dex which suppresses all these symptoms.  Regular readers may recall one of my primary care doctors, who is an infectious disease specialist, surmised that this was why steroids were taken at the same time as Velcade.  Well, here's the problem.  Normally I get Velcade in the afternoon, take the Dex about eight hours later, and then sleep.  Today, I got Velcade at 8AM, and haven't taken Dex.  12 hours later I feel horrible -- fever, headache, flu-like symptoms.  So the moral of the story is: make sure, when taking Velcade, to go to sleep less than 8 hours later.