Showdown at the Fevertherapy Corral

Today starts out normally enough. I'm thankful that I'm not having any adverse reaction to the dendritic cell injections from yesterday.

I get my fevertherapy injection, and Christine tells me that it will be a moderate dose. I head upstairs to my feverbed, and settle in for the wait. In about 20 minutes, the shivering starts in earnest: and today, more than ever before, I'm hit by an intense breathlessness. It's really hard to catch my breath -- I have to sit up to make it at all possible.

Michael asks me if this is serious -- I say yes -- and he bolts downstairs to get Dr. Thaller. In seemingly an instant, the whole crew is at my bedside: Dr. Thaller, Michael, Christine and Tanya. It looks like a SWAT team in action: everything is a blur of slapping on electrodes, stethoscopes, checking and re-checking the various monitors around my bed (and setting new ones up). Dr. Thaller zooms in to give me a quick ear acupuncture (like staple guns to the ear), there is a quick injection into my port of aspirin to calm the fever and digitalis to strengthen my heart.

There's probably a lot more going on, but I'm not exactly paying full attention at this moment. I'm really struggling for breath, my heart is beating hard, it all kind of hurts, and, truth be told, I'm a little freaked out. Dr. Thaller implores me to breathe deep, into my diaphragm, in an attempt to calm things down.

The strangest part is that after everyone has done all the interventions that they can think of, there's nothing for them to do but sit around and watch my strange predicament. I'm still heaving, gasping for breath, but nothing is getting any worse, and I have the presence of mind to perceive that I must be a pretty strange phenomenon to everyone right now.

At one point, Dr. Thaller leans over to Liz and stage whispers to her: "His lungs are fine…his heart is fine…I believe that part of the struggle is in his *soul*!"

This turns out, chronologically and psychologically, to be the climax of the day's experience. I eventually calm down and go into a deep fever: 41.0 degrees (105.8 in Fahrenheit). This is very high and will be very effective in killing cancer cells. I'm always pretty delirious until the fever gets below 38.6 or so -- I keep asking Liz every couple of minutes, "What time is it?", but I never remember what she says.

At the end of the day I am completely spent, again.

I'm not sure what to make of Dr. Thaller's comment about the struggle for my soul. It makes me realize that this week is a very transitional point -- like a swing at the top of its arc, or a pendulum just before it heads back in the opposite direction. There's been a quiet here as the previous period of my life ends, and a beat, just a moment, before the next phase begins. The last couple of months has been all about finding out about my diagnosis, searching for the best treatment, fundraising so I can get here (with an extra dose of helping out my Dad during his own health crisis). Now all those events are at least temporarily stable, and I' m headed into a full-time job search and discovering the next chapter of what it is that I'm doing here.

In a strange way I'm grateful that the transition between these two phases was so clear and dramatic.