Elevated temperature earns me a trip to Sloan Kettering

As I mentioned in my last post – Thursday – I’d been having a slightly elevated temperature, and also some chills. And I just didn’t feel right – I felt run down – not like chemo fatiique – more like I had a viral infection or something like that. I hadn’t used the dumbbells all week.

Well last night – Friday – my temp went over the 100.5 level at which I’m supposed to call the Doc. It only went to 100.7, but that was good enough for me. So this morning I called Dr. Kewalramani’s office and spoke to "Cat", one of his nurses. she said I really needed to get this looked at, by going to the Urgent Care Center at MSK in Manhattan. This is their version of the emergency room. She also said I could be seen at the satellite office in Sleepy Hollow, and left it up to me. After mullling it over a bit I decided to go into the city since I couldn’t be sure how fast they’d get the chest x-ray info from Phellps over to the Sloan Kettering people.

So I drove in myself and got looked at. First time I’ve ever gone to MSK in the city by myself – with the boys getting off the bus at 2:30 it wouldn’t have worked for Brigid to come along. I left the house at 10:30 and was in Urgent Care at just about 11:40.

So after blood work, weeing in a cup, and having a chest x-ray, here were the results:

I have something going on in my chest, and elevated WBC’s in my urine. The urgent care physician couldn’t hear any problem in my chest, and said I don’t have pneumonia, but she said, "something is brewing." They weren’t sure about the white blood cells in the urine – could be a urinary tract infection, but there are no other symptoms.

So I am on Tequin, a broad spectrum antibiotic that, in the words of my friend (Dr.) Paul Novotny "kills everything." I’ll be taking it for a week. I took today’s dose around 2:30, it’s now 9:30 and I feel better already.

I didn’t get home until 4:45, so another planned working day down the rathole, but I am very glad I went in to Sloan. Funnily enough, my sore throat went away yesterday on it’s own, but I knew that something else wasn’t right. 

As my mother said when I headed to Sloan for the high dose chemo and stem cell transplant "do whatever they tell you." Always listen to your mother.

By the way, when I had the chest x-ray, I asked the technician how long it would be before the x-ray was read. He said "about one minute." I guess the x-ray is sent (on a fiber optic line?) to the radiologist reading room and is immediately seen. Pretty amazing.