You know that mild fever I was fighting off late last week? Well, it landed me in urgent care Friday night. Blood tests and a chest X-ray revealed nothing alarming, no telltale sign of why my temperature had risen past the get-your-ass-to-urgent-care threshold (100.5). Not knowing what the cause was, they sent me home with some broad-spectrum antibiotics and orders to wait for results of a blood culture to see if I had a blood infection. Nope. I rested up good on Saturday, then on Sunday, right as I was preparing to head to my daughter's ninth birthday party, I noticed my right eye had quit blinking and when I pursed my lips, they were crooked. The surface of my tongue had gone partially numb. And some intermittent throbbing pain in the cartilage of my right ear was starting to get downright searing. I got on the phone with a consulting nurse and (thankfully) answered no to all the uh-oh-are-you-having-a-stroke? questions she asked me. Something was clearly going on with the right side of my face, but it wasn't anything that couldn't wait until Monday morning. Until I spiked another fever, which made the on-call oncologist worried that my white blood cell count might be crashing to dangerously low levels. So back to urgent care we went right as I was hoping I could snuggle in for a good night's sleep. Pretty quickly, a blood test revealed that my neutrophil count had actually gone up quite a bit since Friday. Just a teency bit below normal for a non-cancer-fighting person. Phew! Whether it was all the rest I got or the iron-rich bison burger I had Saturday night, it was super relieving to find out my immune system wasn't plummeting into underdrive. Here's where the focus shifts to WTF is going on with my face. A CT scan revealed no tumors in my head. Double phew! Based on all my symptoms, my urgent care doc felt fairly confident diagnosing me with Bell's palsy, though the right side of my face wasn't drooping all that much. Still, we wondered if Taxol (a neurotoxin and the chemo drug I'm on right now) could have something to do with it. My oncologist hasn't ever had a patient get Bell's palsy-like neuropathy from Taxol. Sean found a couple journal articles about Taxol and facial palsy (one that deals with bilateral facial nerve palsy that resulted from dose-dense Taxol treatment, and another that ... who am I kidding, I'm too wiped out to read closely enough to tell you how it's different; here's the link if you're medically inclined or curious). So far, most of my symptoms haven't gotten noticeably worse. My vision has gotten a bit blurry, which makes reading and writing pretty difficult. Talk about an inconvenient occupational obstacle for a writer. My ear pain comes and goes and may be hurting me more, maybe not. Perhaps it's just knowing that the root of all this is an inflamed hub of facial nerves right underneath the spot that pulsates painfully every now and then that makes it seem worse. Next steps are:

• An MRI (Thursday) to get a more detailed look at what's going on inside my head.

• A one-week break from chemo – at least.

• An appointment (also Thursday) with my oncologist, who's suggested that we might call me good with eight chemo treatments. There are differing medical opinions about how much more effective, if at all, 12 Taxol treatments are vs. 8. There's also the possibility that I could switch drugs to something that isn't such a neurotoxic motherfucker and finish out a few more weeks of chemo.

You may be wondering what you can do for us during this rough patch. You're always generous with offers of help. Right now, truth be told, I'm so exhausted, I need some time to just rest. Sean's exhausted, too, taking care of me, the kids, trying to keep his head above water at work. I may post some requests on CaringBridge in the coming days, once I can wrap my head around what we need vs. what suboptimal situations we can tolerate for the time being. I love your calls and emails and texts and might be slower to respond to them for a while. Cross your fingers and toes with me, or pray if that's your thing, that if this Bell's palsy, that I bounce back in weeks, not months. It goes away for most folks in those time frames; for some, it never fully goes away. However it shakes out, I'll say this incredibly obvious thing: Fighting cancer is hard enough without another giant, steaming heap of health crap on your plate. That's about as funny as I can be about this shit right now.

#CaringBridge #cancer #Bellspalsy #WTF #chemo #MRI