101.0

No, that's not an FM radio frequency. That was my temperature on Tuesday. Well THAT certainly explains why I felt crappy.

Yes, shortly after I posted here on Tuesday, I just gave up the fight to plow through till quitting time and asked my (highly understanding and generous boss) if I could go over to my mom's and pass out for the rest of the day. The idea of spending almost an hour getting home on the subway just made me shudder, and her apartment is just a short ride cab ride away. (Besides, once again: feel really, really sick = crawl home to mom, ya know?)

Plus she had just called and said, "Something's been beeping for hours in the apartment and I don't know what it is." Great. Just what you want to hear from your 80 year old parent who lives alone: an alarm has gone off, and she doesn't know which one.

Anyway, I dragged myself over to the drugstore a few bloacks away from the office, bought a thermomenter, and cabbed it to mom's, where I curled up in my old bed under the blanket, the coverlet, and a dressing gown (I was COLD). I passed out for a while and then took my temperature later in the afternoon. 101.0 degrees. Oops.

Well, anytime a chemo patient's temp goes above 100.4 you're supposed to call your oncologist, so I did.

What I didn't realize was that this meant she would then tell me to go to the cancer ER (75+ blocks away from my mom's). DOH!

Yeah, just what you want to do when you feel flattened by a semi: get dressed and travel halfway across Manhattan.

Thankfully when I told my sweetie the happy news, he promptly said he'd meet me at the ER. (By the way, I call it the cancer ER because it is an ER dedicated exclusively to cancer patients. No car crash victims, gunshot and stabbing injuries -- think of the germs!!! -- just us chemo folk.)

So we then spent the next 3 hours in the ironically named Urgent Care center. (My initial visit -- a perverse milestone, as I suspect chemo patients may wind up there more than once during the course of their treatment.) During the second half of my sojourn there, we were moved from the reception area to the triage area (the cubicles with the gurneys, for those of you lucky enough never to have set foot inside an ER) where I could lie down, and doze under my sweater and down coat.

The upshot is, that the initial round of tests (I am still waiting for the results of the second batch, which take longer) they determined that my blood counts were not dangerously low, and in fact that my white cells and leukocytes were way up. In short, I had some kind of infection but it was unclear what.

Had my counts (red, white, leuko) been too low, I would have been treated to my first night ever as an inpatient. Having seen just how much fun that's been for my mom and my sweetie's dad, I am happy to pass up that milestone, thanks.

Finally they sent me home with a nice bottle of Cipro to treatment my unknown infectious thingie, which I am guessing was most likely related to the cause of my "acute uncomplicated cystitis", bacterial or not. (I have to say, I am really not pleased with my oncologist so far, and am considering switching, since the ER physician said that my white counts were already high last week -- a fact which apparently didn't make enough of an impression to cause her to give me Cipro THEN!)

I took yesterday off, since my temp was still 100.5 in the morning. (Oh, once again, proof that I was really feeling off: watching 2 hours of food network caused absolutely no hunger, although I may try this espresso brownie recipe in the future -- conveniently, there is a co-worker birthday next week)

Hallelujah - by last night, not only had my fever finally left, but so had (FINALLY) my "non-bacterial bladder irritation". While the former is very important, you have NO IDEA how grateful I am for the latter (unless you too have experienced a UTI).

Today, I am back at work, and once again, posting during my lunch time and adding food porn here. (My ER visit caused my sweetie and I to miss my friend Laura's Peking duck shindig, so in lieu of that, I give you: my mom's belated (my fault) Ching Ming dinner for my dad on Saturday.)

Oh, and today's RTBT: Cipro!