Peter is in the hospital wing of the B.C. Cancer Agency. When he decided to go into hospital again on Sunday night, he called the cancer agency and discovered that he could be ushered straight into a bed there rather than go through the gruelling triage procedure at Vancouver General. Nurses were waiting for him at the entrance to the ward to show him into a very nice private room.

We have all been marveling at the quality of care. All the nurses are great, and knowledgeable about care of cancer patients; his oncologist is just two floors down and pops in several times a day to check on him; and there are pain management and symptom management specialists in the same building.

Peter's fever has been spiking up pretty high a couple of times a day since he went in on Sunday night. The doctors put him on antibiotics immediately suspecting an infection and are doing lots of bloodwork, trying to track down exactly what it is. So far, things are coming up negative. For the first two days, he was nauseous all the time, unable to eat and quite weak. On Wednesday, he had several hours of relief from the fever and the nausea, and could chat and rest comfortably.

On Thursday - that's yesterday - he had his best day yet. They had given him a new drug to help with the nausea which has a sedative effect so he had a good night's sleep - the first in several days. He was quite back to his usual self: laughing, joking, talking politics with Megan and technology with Lorraine.

And yesterday, his regular oncologist brought in a second oncologist to look at Peter's case with fresh eyes. They are trying to get to the bottom of the cause of the fevers. I sat in on the consultation with the new oncologist - he's the resident training with Meg Knowling - and we were both very impressed with his thorough approach. He came up with a plan that systematically checks all the possible locations and causes of infection.

Peter asked me to set this blog to allow replies so that you can send him messages. I haven't figured out how to do that yet so, in the meantime, you can send messages to him at redeye@coopradio.org - subject line: For Peter - and I'll bring them in to him. He's not quite up to taking phone calls and having more visitors yet, but he loves to hear from people.