Saturday, September 10, 2005: You may not remember the news from yesterday, so let me recap: no sign of cancer in the MRI and we were in the process of scheduling the removal of Leela’s catheter. (Here’s yesterday’s post.)

Last night Leela’s “low grade fever” turned into a “fever” which triggers for oncology patients an automatic trip to the emergency room. It was almost a routine visit to the ER—it was the fourth since chemo started. We arrive. We fill out the triage form. We are seen and brought back before anyone else. We wait. We wait some more. Leela has blood drawn and is given IV antibiotics. At this point, on other visits we would wait for the blood results to determine whether Leela’s is immune suppressed and needs to be admitted. This time we were sent immediately home because earlier that day she had had a test indicating her immune system was stronger (or maybe just more active) than it had ever been since these tests began.

At today 11am we got a call from the hospital saying that the blood cultures they had taken the night before came back positive for a bacteria infection, which triggers an automatic admission to the hospital. So Leela is in the hospital again. And with positive cultures the standard operative procedure is to keep patients in the hospital until the cultures have been negative for 48 hours and the lab has identified what antibiotics best treat the specific infection. In July Leela was in a very similar situation and it took four days before she was discharged despite feeling very good the whole time. This time it seems unlikely that Leela will be discharged before Tuesday (9/12), three days from now.

At this point, Leela does not appear to have a serious infection. Though her temperature did spike again this afternoon, we are still waiting to hear whether the culture taken at 12:30pm today is positive. The good news is that Tylenol seems to be very good at treating the symptoms of the infection.

Regardless of when exactly Leela is discharged this will delay the removal of her catheter. Unless by some miracle, the positive culture is declared a mistake, Leela will require at least a couple of weeks of IV antibiotics through her catheter. So now we wait, and see how things turn out.