Lucca
InnocentBystander
Sorry to hear of your problems OP, and all the others too. My only comment as a husband of a sufferer who's been through chemo twice is to do all you can to avoid any form of pathogen: infections and bugs in certain foods such as raw vegetables and any other possible bug-bearing item. My wife had neutropaenic sepsis when a winter infection took hold and she ended up very poorly in a positive pressure isolation room on IV antobiotics. Good Luck to all.
Pathogen ? Can you explain a bit more ? Should I not eat raw vegetables?
Sorry for the delay. Pathogen is a word I used to cover all possible sources of infection. You should not eat anything that might have bacteria, viruses, fungal growths - anything that will harm you if you have a severely weakened immune system. I asked various people about raw vegetables when my wife was on docetaxel and I didn't get a satisfactory answer to whether raw organic root vegetables could contain microbes from the soil (and manure perhaps) inside the root, tuber, etc., no matter how well peeled and washed on the outside. Therefore I made vegetable soup with the raw vegetables my wife would usually eat confident that the heat of cooking would kill any bugs.
The time she was seriously ill with an infection it was picked up just prior to starting the chemo sessions but as it was only like a cold, the hospital said it was not going to be a problem. Oh how wrong they were! I had never seen her so ill that she went back to bed with a temperature of 39ºC and was incapable of getting up unaided. The A&E people took a while diagnosing neutropaenic sepsis but after the blood results came back she was isolated from everyone that was not in PPE and confined to a positive pressure side ward and given IV antibiotics. Forty-eight hours later she was discharged but it was a serious infection that would have killed her untreated.
with my best wishes. Exhaustion is the price paid fir chemo, and hope this time it will result in a good outcome.
