Michele --

Be sure to take your husband's temperature every morning and evening -- my husband had the same sort of very sudden (overnight) change for the worse in his last week of treatment -- suddenly a LOT more phlegm, coughing, gagging, and nausea. He was going through a box of tissues in a few hours! I took his temp and he had a fever -- not high but over the 100.5F the oncologists set as a threshhold for calling in. It was a Friday and he had treatment, so we went in and the RO nurse and our RO jumped all over this and had blood taken for culture, chest xray etc. He went home as it would be 24 hours for the blood test to come back. They called next day and said COME IN NOW! -- you have a penicillin-resistant staph (MRSA) blood infection -- of course being Saturday this meant the ER -- luckily it was a quiet night (for inner city Baltimore) and he was shortly transferred over to the Kimmel CCC. The ER already had him on IV vancomycin and some other antibiotics -- he actually (except for the coughing and phlegm) was feeling not too bad by then -- they gave him a suction tube to help with the phlegm, also Mucinex every 6 hours. By the next morning the phlegm was essentially back to "background", and the nausea was gone, so this sudden downturn was apparently primarily in response to the infection. Anyway, 3 more days in hospital, two of them going downstairs for last two days of radiation treatment, and they sent him home. No other problems except he had lost 8-9 pounds! (despite eating pretty well) -- much later, in an article on MRSA infections we read that vancomycin interfers with digestion and folks with MRSA often lose a great deal of weight during treatment. However considering how serious these infections can be, he was very lucky.

Our RO nurse constantly alerted her patients to possibility of infection -- what with the chemo everyone is much more susceptible and what better place to be exposed to something than a hospital! Thus the admonition to take temperatures regularly and not take any pain-killers that might suspress this indicator.

Gail