Chemo interruption due to low WBC

My husband has the similar level of disease and 14 mos of palliative treatment. He had to temporarily delay and reduce dosages and there was no noticeable disease progression. For us, success is measured by quality of life. Best wishes to you both.

I wish she had a quality of life. Between starting out severely anemic and fatigue from the chemo, my wife can barely get out of bed. The whole thing has been so frustrating for her and now with the side effects getting worse… so hard to be positive.

First- sorry about her and your situation.

There are some things that can be done. Besides, holding off chemo to enable the body to self-recover, blood transfusions can be done, there are some meds that can stimulate the body to create more and one can supplement with vitamins and minerals used to make the cells that are low.

Not a physician and have not had these severe symptoms myself - I've been low on platelets since the start of my chemo over two years ago, but not significant enough to do anything about it.

I hope the best for all of you in this situation. I wish I could be of help.

@chuckmii, how are you and your wife doing?

We were able to have treatment and now adding Udenyca on the Friday after treatment to boost WBC production. That comes with its own side effects (bone pain , which she had) so also added Claritin for 5 days after that. CEA only went down 16 points from last time but still down so taking that as positive.

Side effects/reactions are different this time. Previously she would get a steroid rush but this time she was just wiped out tired from the start. Also, extreme taste change, hand shakes and neuropathy much worse.

Still fighting and 2 more treatments before next CT scan to see how it’s really going.

Overall, a bit more positive but damn this is hard.

@chuckmii, this is hard. You sure got that right. It's hard for her, but it must also be hard to watch someone you love go through all this. How are you both doing?

CEA went down another 22 points which is good. She is now on Morphine due to the pain and that has helped but there has also been some breakthrough pain and taking both morphine and hyrdrocodone, really made her loopy after a couple days. We had 3 okay days after treatment this time and the last 2 days have not been good. You would think sleeping is good but when you loose your appetite and don't drink enough water, that's bad. Monitoring her very closely today as she was half incoherent yesterday and that scared her. She doesn't like taking narcotics and she seems to be one of the few people that has not become constipated from them, just the opposite. one more cycle and then CT scan on the 16th of October. We and the doctor are cautiously optimistic but from my research there are a few troubling things in her bloodwork. She really doesn't want to do more chemo after this first round of 6 because of all the side effects but I think that is where we are going to be at... maybe a different drug combo. Every time we feel like we turn a corner we have some bad days which knock us back down. Staying strong as we can, as that is all we can do.