Unexpected Hospital Re-Entries

There are a lot of things that one expect to happen when a loved one is going through chemo:

1. Bad news (such as the diagnosis for example)
2. Chemo to be rough (involve vomiting, irritability, etc.)
3. Hospital stays for treatment

Then there are things that one doesn't really see coming, such as surprise trips to the hospital for secondary infections.  On September 2nd (the day after my birthday) my husband spiked a fever of 103.4 and needless to say we went to the hospital and after multiple bags of blood and counts not responding, a short (but very scary stay in the ICU), a brain scan for possible aneurysm, and days of immense pain so painful that looking at him made the onlooker want to cry, they found out he had E. Coli.  After twenty four hours of being on specific antibiotics for e. coli, he was like a caterpillar who'd just become a butterfly... turned over a whole new leaf and you'd never believe that he was the same person who went to sleep in that bed the night before.
It was one of the most scary moments of my life, might have even topped his moment of diagnosis.

That said, he was released from the hospital on Saturday (10/13) and we didn't even make it home and I had to pull over and let him be sick for quite an extended period of time.  He soon had a rather intense headache (he said 9 on a 10 scale).  He wasn't able to keep anything down, so morning medications were gone.... our oncologist called and had us direct admitted.  When we got there and saw our oncologist, he told us that because the chemo he'd just had targets the brain, he could possibly have a chemical meningitis... but that it wasn't possible to prove.  If it was chemical meningitis, he said simple steroids would do the trick. By early evening yesterday, Tom was able to hold down dinner and was able to get sleep overnight.  Let us hope that it did the trick.

Our oncologist told us with his particular chemo regimen, with each discharge there is about a 25% chance he will return with some sort of secondary infection.  I suppose that when I'm told that I should be less frightened when it happens, though I don't think that was the case.  In any case, I'm very relieved that we were able to fast track to recovery.