She rested fairly well last night, but when awake, she complained of knee pain and sometimes some back pain. The meds are keeping her very sedated. Answers to questions come rarely, are always delayed, and are usually inaccurate. It’s nice that she’s able to rest though. The doc this morning was worried that her liver or kidneys aren’t filtering the opioids and that they are dwelling longer and causing such extreme drowsiness. They did some blood work and found that her ammonia levels were very high. It was over 1100 and I think normal levels are around 350. So, they are giving her lactulose which should control those ammonia levels and should also help her have a much needed bowel movement. We’ll be in the hospital at least another 24 hours.
Month: February 2016 (page 2 of 2)
Over the night, Lori had a big pain increase. She described it as “deep bone pain” and didn’t bother to elaborate any more than that. She told the nurse she wanted Valium which is a significant thing for us because Valium is kind of the big knockout punch of pain meds for her. It worked though, and she was able to rest and sleep. She also experienced a little bit of trouble getting deep breaths which meant the fluid was already back. They did an x-ray this morning to see, and sure enough the fluid was there again. So, Dr C (the interventional radiologist) signed her up for another round of draining and a catheter placement. They just finished with that procedure, and she is resting back in the room now. They got another 1700 cc’s from her chest. Sheesh. Should be easily managed from here on out with the catheters. Staying in the hospital at least one more night.
Her nurse was so good today. Sort of like Kiley and Nona from IU. She’s just perfectly cut out to do care-taking. Everyone who works with Lori has been really great actually. They are very loving, and it’s nice to be here.
Also, no kidding the food from the cafeteria is amazing. I love their salmon.
Today, they drained 2 liters of fluid from Lori’s chest around her right lung. She’s feeling better and even slept lying flat for the past hour! They didn’t install a catheter for the chest yet for various reasons, but they scheduled one to be installed on Thursday if fluid builds up again.
I’m going to go ahead and make a prediction today that by March 1st Lori will be doing much better than she is today on Feb 1st. I think that’s a fairly bold prediction because the average observer would likely instead predict that she will be far worse. Certainly, her trajectory has trended downward over the past few weeks. However, I think she’s turning the corner, and there’s a good chance we’ll see another rally ala June 2015. I’ll explain why, and I’ll use an analogy that I can confidently predict will annoy a bunch of people.
We’re back in the ER tonight in Dayton as Lori’s chest pressure increased to the point that she couldn’t breathe if she reclined even just at a small angle. This made sleep nearly impossible, and although we thought she could wait until Monday’s appointments to get it checked out, it became clear that she needed to be in the hospital. This issue had been a growing problem throughout the course of the weekend, and we had already decided to cancel the trip to Indy to see Dr. S. It seemed more pressing to get the chest pressure relieved and that meant seeing the docs in Dayton to get it ordered. Unfortunately, when she had the catheter installed last Friday, they didn’t treat the chest area. I’m not sure how that got overlooked, but it’s causing trouble now.
They are admitting her tonight so she’s ready to have another thoracentesis tomorrow. That means tonight will be kinda miserable. She can’t sleep even slightly reclined for more than a few minutes before she has to sit up in bed to acquire a solid breath.
I have pictures of her X-Rays. The picture on the right is of her lungs on 26 Jan after the fluid was drained (so what the lungs should look like when clear of fluid). The left picture is of her X-Rays from tonight. You can see on tonight’s X-Rays that her right lung (the one on the picture’s left) is heavily surrounded by fluid. It appears white and kind of hazy/cloudy on the image. The doc says it looks like there is more fluid built up now than there was prior to the draining last week. Last week, they drained 1200 cc’s from around the right lung. We’ll see what it is this time. Hopefully they can do this early today.
On the plus side, her platelets were much higher at 70K and her hemoglobin was way up too.