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Hi All

Well, I'm back home (yay!). We finally heard on Wednesday morning that I was going to go home on Thursday...a full two weeks from when I entered the hospital. They have me on steroids (prednisone) temporarily, and hopefully I get off those in the two week tapering schedule they have me on, so I can get another treatment!

I flew in Thursday afternoon, and we had to stop at a medical supply place. The doctors decided I still need help with nutrition for a while longer, so I will be receiving infusions of nutrients overnight for the next couple of weeks. It comes through a little pump which, when we turn the big box fan on in the bedroom, you can't hear very well. We stopped at the medical supply place to pick up the medication, and to bags of supplies, including syringes and glucose meter. Because the nutrient bags are full of glucose I have to check my blood suger after the thing has started in the evening, and give myself insulin if necessary. So we picked all that stuff up and headed home.

We were home for, oh, a half an hour when the home health care nurse arrived to help us get started with the IV nutrients. After 2hours of training, I was done, even if the nurse wasn't quite yet. I called a time out, crawled onto the couch, cried from exhaustion, then got back up to learn the last little bit. SIGH. Once we got 'er all set up, it really wasn't that difficult to put together. I have a port-a-cath, which means I have a semi-permanent IV connected which makes it easier to do the nutrients. The last two nights have been relatively uneventful. Maybe that's cuz I got me a prescription for sleeping pills (whee). The nutrients (known as TPN) is only hooked up for 12 hours overnight, so I'm detached the rest of the day. I'm going to check with a dietician to get a schedule of food so I can get off this stuff soon.

Today we got out and went looking for some pretty flowers to go on the deck. I think late June may be a bit late for flower hunting. We'll try the Saturday market next week.

Tomorrow is Dave's birthday, but we're going to dinner tonight. Hooray for Dave!

Cheryl

You want news, we got news

It's Sunday, I'm studying for my GIS midterm (another post/story), I've got a big pot of marinara sauce simmering, which will most likely be my lunch/dinner for the week, I've got StatTracker up to follow the progress of my first-place fantasy baseball team, it's night, and we're wearing sunglasses.

The bad news is that Cheryl is still in the hospital. The good news is that she should be getting out soon, as the docs think they have gotten a handle on her nausea and nutrition problems - she's actually hungry and sounds to be in pretty good spirits; they just need to take care of, ahem, the other end of the digestive tract and she should be getting out in a day or two - so much for the fly down in the morning, leave in the afternoon plan. She's been there nearly two weeks! Oy vey, I don't want to think about the bills we're going to get.

The good news there is that we're very nearly close to hitting the catastrophic amount on her insurance, at which point, insurance picks up 100% of everything.

The bad news is...well, let's just say that the catastrophic amount isn't a tiny number.

Well, I hear you can get a healthy five figures for a kidney...I got an extra one...

I guess this qualifies as good news

So, the news from Portland seems to be fairly positive. Cheryl got both an endoscopy and a CAT scan today ("so what kind of cat do they use for that, har har"), and the results were, at the very least, not negative: the tumors in her stomach are not blocking the exit to her stomach, and the CAT scan revealed no blockage in her small intestine, as possibly feared.

What the gastroenterologist thinks might be happening is the tummy tumors are causing the muscles responsible for moving food down into the small intestine to spasm at inappropriate times, and that's causing the problems with nausea and vomiting.

Cheryl is, last time I talked to her, feeling much better, getting an IV full of fluids and nutrition, and they'll be trying yet another anti-nauseal which may relax those cranky tummy muscles, although she won't be home for another few days yet.

I finally got tired of eating popcorn and canned chili for dinner and decided to utilize my once vaunted cooking skills, thawing out some frozen fish that needed to be used up and improvising a tilipia piccata (with capers, no less) which was surprisingly tasty. I'll probably make me a monster pot of chorizo-and-black-bean chili for tomorrow to last me the upcoming week - I really do need to be cutting down on all the pizza for breakfast/lunch/dinner/midnight snack I've been chowing down on lately...

Dave

A slight change of plans

I got Cheryl piled onto a flight to PDX this morning, and the plan was for her to return to Moscow tonight, however, once she got there and the docs looked at her lab work, they decided that they'd better keep her overnight to get some fluids and vitamins in her (which is what I've been saying for weeks now; one cannot live on toast and Ensure shakes forever), and they'll run some tests to figure out why she's still nauseous and vomiting despite being on practically every anti-nauseal drug known to mankind.

They're brining in an gastroenterologist later today and they might do the ol' camera-in-the-tummy routine again (my suspicion: Bitey and Co. are clogging the exit to the stomach, making it hard for food to get through. Remember, though, I'm not a doctor, I just play one on the Internet).

Accordingly, they've put off the 2nd dose of ipilumimab until they get this straightened away. On the plus side, aside from the constant nausea, Cheryl's been doing reasonably better, only vomiting once every two or three days instead of two or three times a day. That may not sound like much improvement, but we'll take what we can get.

Hopefully we'll have some news in the next 24 hours, and it'll be good news. As always, happy thoughts are much appreciated.

Dave