Actually, this week it is VERY messy. I am back in the hospital again. After my chemo infusion on Tuesday, I started to get nauseous. Then I started to vomit. Then I couldn’t keep the anti-nausea drugs down. Things were intense. I was hurting. And, it was Friday, meaning I’d be out of the doctor’s hands for the weekend (weekdays I spend all day in the hospital to get my morning and afternoon radiation doses). So Dr. N made an executive decision. Head for ER for evaluation and admission to stem the intense vomiting.
I waited for Jesse to get down to Radiation Oncology so he could carry my backpack for me, and we hiked through the hospital to ER. After some trouble accessing my subcutaneous power port, they ran an IV straight into my right hand. Started dripping fluids and anti-nausea drugs. Debated whether the brown flecks of blood in my gut fluids (visible in the cannula of the feeding tube) were due simply to the wrenching damage of the radiation and chemotherapy, or were a new, more dangerous problem somewhere in my gastrointestinal system.
They considered running an endoscope into my gut. After thinking about it some, and an interview with the gastroenterologist, they decided it was unlikely to be some new life-threatening illness but simply the fallout from regular treatments. Resident Dr. J scoped my throat and didn’t find any obvious inflammatory spots or specific bleeding ulcers. Just the general swelling of the treatments ripping up healthy tissue at a level of intensity hopefully just less than that meted out to the malignancy.
It is now Saturday evening. The fluids and antinauseals seem to have stemmed the intense fits of vomiting. In fact, I just tried a can of liquid “food” to see how my system handled it. It’s been an hour, and it stayed down. Of course, they gave me dilaudid and Ativan at around the same time, so I’m guessing road-killed chipmunk would stay down, since my entire bodily system was drug-dimmed.
They put me on the “Advanced Therapy” floor. What that means seems to be that I am monitored 24 hours a day electronically, so if I get up to go to the can or move from bed to chair, somebody at the front desk knows about it and sends a nurse running to find out what’s wrong. At this point, there’s nothing particularly wrong, except I still feel like shit. But I’m not nauseous. So I guess it’s just another trade-off.
Expect to go home tomorrow. Seems like I can eat without getting desperately ill, and they’ll write scrips for liters of antinauseals. All things considered, I’m lucky to get this entry into “print”. I’m afraid this week I will not get any other of the sites updated. I bet Dr. Crossley does, though, so surf on over to ccrossley.typepad.com/ to get your weblog fix for the week. I know I’m way behind on email, I’ll try to get caught up. And I’ll get the rest of the empire kicked into gear next weekend, so be prepared to do some reading. Assuming I don’t repeat this health “event” after Tuesday’s round of chemotherapy!
I leave you with a couple of photos from the hospital grounds. Thanks for being here, everybody. I love you all, and you give me strength to keep on the road!
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