Big News Today – Day +9

We’re pretty excited and have a couple of really big pieces of news to share today!

Health

First of all lets talk about health. Cindy’s immunity counts have finally started to come up again. It’s been a string of zeros for a long while now as the picture shows. Just this AM we got the news that the ANC is coming back up. This is very important. And the nurses know how important it is for the patient. I say this because Nicole was the one to announce it and was bouncing around the room with excitement. They really are invested in positive patient outcomes.

ANC is the Absolute Neutrophil Count and should be between 1.5 to 8.0 in a normal person. The neutrophil’s are the white blood cells that fight infection and anything else in your body. Her count has been 0.0 basically since the end of high-dose chemo and this is called being “neutropenic”. It is very dangerous state as your body basically has no ability to fight anything – an army without soldiers as an analogy. This is expected of course given what the chemo is doing – namely killing the stem cells that produce the white blood cells. The process is long as the metaphorical garden of stem cells was wiped out, replanted, and now growing and waiting for flowers (neutrophils) to start blooming again. It looks like that is starting to happen – springtime in the body!

Other Numbers

The other numbers bounce around a lot as a result of the chemo, but also because nurses are giving blood or platelets often. Low platelets (PLT) means things like uncontrolled nosebleeds and worst-case, internal bleeding. Low hemoglobin (Hb) means fatigue and draggy feelings. There is another really important number they track and that is magnesium (Mg). So far I haven’t actually uncovered why this number drops so much at times. My best guess is magnesium is used in the rebuilding of either stem cells or white blood cells. Any reading I do simply says “the drugs cause it” – thanks for the useful information WebMD. Little known fact – Magnesium is also nature’s natural laxative. Now you know, so eat your green leafy vegetables, whole grains, fruits, fish, nuts, and legumes!

She did suffer from some fever temperatures during the earlier day. This is usually due to infection. The nurses quickly got her on a broad spectrum antibiotic. Broad spectrum is used to kill a lot of things as they didn’t know what was causing it. While the did this, they also took blood cultures to try and determine what was causing the fever symptoms – often called “chemo fever”.  The results have so far come back negative and with the ANC coming up, this hopefully means she can start fighting whatever is causing it herself soon.

Mouth & Throat

She’s also been suffering with mouth and throat sores, almost like strep throat, or as our friends in the Caribbean call it, “The Grip”. As we all know, the mouth is full of bacteria and without the white blood cells to kill off the bad bacteria, infection starts pretty quickly. This has gotten progressively better over the last few days – likely the early signs of the white cell count coming up again. As usual, the nurses made sure there was a steady stream of narcotics to help with this. And I made sure there was enough ice water. I also had to do a few grocery runs – pickles and olives were in high demand. And yesterday wine gums. I don’t even ask questions anymore.

Giving Back

The other really big news is we have our donation site live to help give back to the hospital and doctors and nurses. We have been struggling a bit with the offers of financial support and how to best approach this topic. Canada has a truly amazing health care system (despite negative talk out there) and our personal expenses have been pretty low. And nothing medicine, treatment, or hospital wise. And the nurses and doctor always ensured we were totally covered regardless of supplemental insurance (we don’t have). We would be broke frankly if we had to even partially support this treatment ourselves – this stuff is expensive. The unquestionable care and treatment Cindy has received from day-one motivated us to find a way to give back to people who gave so selflessly.

JCC Foundation

The Juravinski Cancer Centre Foundation is a charitable organization – importantly donations can be claimed as a tax credit in both Canada and the USA. Most importantly however, the proceeds go directly to the people and areas we designate – no overhead, no percentage scrape, no BS. This is inline with what we were looking for as an option.

We chose to honour two members of the staff specifically – Dr. Kouroukis and Jenn Wiernikowski. These two individuals were, and are, instrumental in all aspects of this process. With this honour, we are directing funds in their name to two specific areas within the hospital – C4 and ODS. C4 is where all the inpatient treatment and stem cell transplant were done. And ODS is where the outpatient work was performed most of the time. Any money donated will help these areas and employees. It is used for additional staff training, product and equipment upgrades, and we hope, a little fun. We were able to take advantage of the generosity of those before us and we’d like to help give back now.

If you would, please check out the fundraising page here https://www.cindyfortuna.com/cindys-badass-fundraiser/ and consider a donation on Cindy’s behalf to this terrific foundation and all the people who have helped along the way.

Thanks and look for another update soon!