This steroid withdrawal is a lot more painful than I’d thought it would be. I’ve lost the fatigue but gained a crazy amount of back and shoulder pain. When I woke up this morning I could barely move. It took a couple doses of morphine and a heat pack to get to some form of relief. Thankfully, they’ve started me on arthritis medication which actually made a big difference, although it still hurts when I laugh. That was an issue when my buddy visited me today. I’m hoping in the coming days I will be done with the withdrawal symptoms.

White blood cell count has been steady at 8,000 for the past couple days. The doctor said the chemo might take a little while to have an impact on that. I haven’t felt any real side effects from the methotrexate and cytarabine yet so I guess the drugs’ effects are still yet to come. Im thinking within the next week,we’ll have a sense as to whether or not this protocol is doing the trick. 

I had been ending all of my blog updates with “until tomorrow” but that kind of implied that I would post a blog post every day. Not that I don’t have the time, but there’s just not a whole lot of noteworthy stuff that takes place in a 24 hour timespan here on the 15th floor of PMH. I thought about changing my signature to “until I’m god damn good and ready” but I figure “still fighting” is more hope-inspiring.

Still fighting,

Ethan Wissell