First ER Visit: Oh Joy!

Wife and I got home from work, and Amanda was in obvious distress. Told us that the night before she was getting chills, and that she was really hot and not feeling well. Quick check with the thermometer...102.8 (39.2 Celsius for our fellow Canadians). Made a quick call to our Provincial Health Link service and they told us to take her to Emergency.

Interesting thing about Emergency rooms and Cancer Patients...Got to the triage nurse and confirmed elevated temperature and pulse rate was about 125 at rest. Of course we are concerned about an infection from the Bone Marrow biopsy and Amanda's is also complaining of a new pain in her upper right chest that has us concerned of a possible blood clot. Got sent over to registration and no sooner did she sit down, an orderly came over, put a mask on her and immediately took her back to a bed! I had to stay and register her and get her chart from the registration desk.

Anyhow, long story short, ER doc is convinced Amanda has an infection somewhere and a possible clot. She warned us to expect an overnight stay, but needed to consult with a hematologist to have her admitted. In the mean time, she hung a round of antibiotics and ordered some additional blood work (oh goodie - more needles!), chest X-Ray, etc.

Around midnight, in waltzes in the Hematologist...I'm pretty sure he is an intern, and if he is I am just about to the point that any interns that see my daughter will immediately be shown the exit! FIRST thing out of his mouth is something to the effect of "I came down here, but expected to see someone much sicker"...REALLY! Keep in mind that at this point Amanda has had two bags of Saline and the antibiotics had been in her system for over 2 hours. She was feeling better admittedly, but what an idiot! Tells us that her d-dimer is elevated but not significantly enough so is cancelling the lung scan. Her WBC levels are at around 18,000 but that they were at 14,000 two days ago so he was attributing that to her disease. Basically punted us out of the ER...which franky is just fine with everyone by now.  My wife and I get the impression that the ER staff are miffed at the situation, especially when one nurse comes in and says "we get to go home...for now". Kinda funny and kinda not so funny. Oh well we wanted to go home, and Amanda seemed better.