Back to the 7th floor of Strong

To start, a recap of last week.
Last Thursday Florian was to begin 15 days of intensive chemo. He went to Rochester but they decided not to start chemo because his white blood cells count was too low.
They would rather wait a week so that he could rest and have his white blood cells count go back up. Given he only had his meds to avoid the side effects things were going pretty well (relatively speaking of course). After 10 minutes of standing up, he still had to sit lay down.

So overall on Saturday and Sunday he was starting to eat again almost back to his normal self. We thought everything would only get better until next Thursday, the day were he would have to begin his chemo cycle if his white blood cells were back up.

Monday he started to complain about very bad stomachaches, it wasn't the first time but it seemed different and worse this time and the pain killers didn't have much of an effect anymore. Today since it kept hurting we went to Strong after having explained his symptoms over the phone.

They had to do an MRI as usual, by the afternoon they told us it was his pancreas the exact cause not being known but we should know soon. He received a medication during his chemo which can cause inflammation of the pancreas, but it can also be stones in his gallbladder.

Meanwhile he is getting higher doses of morphine for the pain but it isn't over yet. The effect only lasts for about an hour during which he can rest but the pain comes back pretty quickly.

So here I am trying to understand what everything does, the pancreas, gallbladder,...What would we do without the internet?
The nurses are also giving me things for the injection rashes so that they do not hurt: Florian has to have injections everyday for at least the next 3 months, sometimes when I do it it burns quite a lot.

I am telling you now, I am ready to pass the nurse's exams after Florian has recovered.

Overall Florian is taking his old habits back and is talking with everybody (mostly when he is not in pain and has his morphine). The nurse who is taking care of him tells us he studied bio then specialized in nursing and has now finished a master in music at Eatsman (University well known for music apparently). This is not the first time that nurses tell us their life story and it's always different and interesting.

We are hoping that tomorrow we will know a bit more and that we will have a better idea of the time we will have to stay at Strong.

We will keep the blog updated as soon as we know more.