I apologize that it’s been a bit since my last update. We’ve had a few new developments since then. On Saturday evening Kendall starting having some (new) back pain and spasms that could be pretty intense. They continued through that night and into Sunday morning, when I finally called the on-call Hematology Fellow for the weekend to see what they recommended. He said that we needed to take Kendall immediately to the University of Utah ER.
It’s been a long few days. We ended up spending 15 hours in the ER (plus an hour’s travel either way). We eventually got home at 5:00 a.m. Monday morning, just to need to go back up about 10:40 for more labs and transfusions where we were gone for another six hours.
Thankfully their visitor policy changed last week, so I was able to be with him the entire time. While we were in the ER they discovered that Kendall has a new fracture in his spine, above where his fusions in his back already are. The doctors aren’t sure what caused it, whether his bones are more brittle now as a result of his chemotherapy, possibly his spine can’t withstand that amount of “hardware,” or the real concern is if the fracture was caused from spreading cancer in his spine. That would be pretty bad news, considering the amount of intense chemo he has been undergoing the past month. He originally wasn’t scheduled for a PET scan until next week, when he would have been finished with this first full round of chemo, but that has now been moved up to this Thursday. He is also currently scheduled for more labs and an appointment with the neurosurgery team on Wednesday, and several infusions of chemo on Friday.
They told us that this type of vertebrae fracture can’t heal on it’s own, but surgery is obviously….complicated for Kendall right now with everything else. In the meantime, they created a custom back brace for him to wear that has helped a great deal with the pain. In typical Kendall-style, he has already been contemplating possibly Halloween costumes that could incorporate it.
-Suzanne