NEW ADVENTURES

Today was an eventful day. The original plan was to visit a sleep doctor since I have been having difficulty sleeping. I believe I mentioned in a previous post that I will fall asleep and then wake up almost immediately gasping for breath. So, I did visit the sleep doctor who is also a pulmonologist. In fact she was the first doctor I saw back last July and was the one who diagnosed my cancer. Last Wednesday or Thursday I started developing swelling in my feet and legs. That condition got progressively worse so the sleep issue became secondary and the swelling became the urgent condition we discussed most this morning. The doctor scheduled an abdominal and leg scan to determine if blood clots were the cause of the swelling.That took place later in the afternoon and I am happy to report that there are no blood clots. In the meantime the sleep doctor prescribed a sleep study that will take place on March 15. She believes I have sleep apnea, a condition that has gotten progressively worse in the last several months. She says that apnea could be the cause of my rapid heart beat.

I also had an appointment today with my cardiologist. The medicine he prescribed a week and one half ago, amiodarone, has not been working as rapidly as I, or he, would like so he now has me scheduled to go in this Friday to get zapped. He thinks that if we can get the heart rate slowed down and stabilized the medicine can keep it under control. He also prescribed some medicine to take care of the swollen legs and feet. He is not quite sure what is causing that condition but he said he hoped it was heart failure. Colleen and I both blinked on that one, but he explained that he can treat heart failure and that could be caused by the prolonged presence of the high heart rate. He also put on another 48-hour heart monitor to see just how high my heart rate is at present. Last time it averaged 143 over 48 hours. This time we expect it will be somewhere between 110 and 120.

Meanwhile my oncologist was in the loop on all of this throughout the day and he is going to move up my next CT scan. It was scheduled for March 25 but we’ll be doing it sooner than that, as the cancer could be involved in all of these things, particularly the fluid buildup in the legs. We also had blood test done today for a variety of things, but those results had not come back by the end of the day so we don’t know if they revealed anything that might relate to everything that is going on.