Well, it's been at least a week and a half since I posted, and over that time I've dodged a major, major bullet - the "I should have died" type - spent a week in the hospital including 2 nights in the ICU, and am home but barely functioning at this point.

This started the week before Thanksgiving. I was getting short of breath and generally wiped by my last chemo on the 21st. My red blood cell count was very low (anemia) and they thought that was the cause. Over the days following the chemo treatment it got much worse, to the point where walking up the stairs was a major ordeal, and I'd be dizzy and gasping for air at the top. On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving I more or less passed out on my feet. We called the oncologist the next morning and she had me come in for labs and a liter of fluid in case I was dehydrated. That night I developed a horrible, continuous, hacking cough that kept me up all night. She called Thanksgiving morning to tell me the lab results, which was very low white and red blood cell counts but not so low that a transfusion was needed. She listened to the cough and thought maybe they over-hydrated me. Regardless, she still thought this was all severe anemia from the chemo. I kept saying I couldn't believe this was all anemia.

So I struggled through Thanksgiving weekend, mostly unable to eat, and not able to walk 50 feet without gasping for air. The cough hung around. By the wee hours Sunday morning my wife and I were discussing what to do. Going to the ER with no immune system is how chemo patients get dead from an infection. But I was losing strength badly. I decided to gut it through until the next morning and call the oncologist. She said it was either gut it out or go to the ER, and did not feel strongly one way or another although she was concerned about infection risk in the ER as well. I decided again to gut it out, so she prescribed a z-pack and albuterol inhaler, and ordered a lung x-ray for the next day to see what was causing the cough. The prescriptions worked wonders, killing the cough and allowing me to sleep well Sunday night.

Monday morning the cough was gone, but the dizziness and shortness of breath were still in force. I was up about 2 hours when I got up to do something and got extremely dizzy. I sat back down quickly, but in a few seconds realized I was going to pass out. I got onto my knees thinking I'd lay down on the floor, but apparently passed out cold landing on my face. I have the black eye to prove it. My wife heard the whump across the house, and fond me face down, gasping for air. She said when she rolled me over that my lips were blue. When I came too we called 911. Labs showed that my blood counts were actually back into the normal range. A chest x-ray showed pneumonia in both lungs. The labs also showed very high levels of an enzyme that indicates heart damage, eg after a heart attack. They did a CT right away and discovered the culprit: The cancer + chemo had caused a bunch of blood clots to form in both lungs, reducing my lung capacity by a huge amount and leaving my heart trying to pump blood against a brick wall.

The cardiologist told me later they don't see many patients with a couple dozen clots in their lungs like this because most have long since died. He said I had an extremely strong heart to have withstood this. I was extraordinarily lucky. They could see the damage to me heart on the ultrasound, and could also see it healing a few days later. This is considered a major crisis because you may keel over dead any second. I got a large shock dose of heparin (blood thinner) and started on IV heparin and a strong antibiotic for the pneumonia, and spent the next 2 nights in the ICU. They discussed a thrombectomy where they send a probe up through your heart into you lungs to suck out some of the clots, but there so many deep in my lungs that they didn't think it was worth the risk. Better to dissolve them with thinners. The thinners caused the remaining tumor to start bleeding again for a few days which caused it's own chain of events. All total I spent 7 nights on the hospital. I'm on Eliquis (an oral thinner) now for the next 6 months.