3 Years, 1 Month, 10 Days

(Give or take a day, maybe.)

It’s been a while, sober-friends.

Gosh I just looked and it’s an even longer while than I thought: we had only just got back from the transplant meet/greet.

Well the past month has been an adventure. That same week I last wrote, we killed ourselves getting his potassium high enough to do the stress echo on that Friday and then we found out the following week that it wasn’t the right kind of stress echo and his heart rate didn’t go high enough so that has to be repeated and it was scheduled for this Friday the 5th..,

...but he got admitted again yesterday. This time for bleeding. We had been going along pretty well and doing all the things the transplant team told us to do, including weekly labs. The older two kids drive his car up from New Jersey last week so he drove -himself- to his standing Thursday lab draw. Friday the nurse called and asked that he get another set of labs on Monday — that piqued my curiosity because it meant “acute change” and probably wasn’t good. On Saturday morning the labs posted to MyChart and I saw the issue: in a week his hemoglobin had dropped from 9.3 to 8.5 and his white count had bumped a bit. So fine, watch and wait. He had complained of diarrhea and how that was causing increasing blood in his stool but he still thought it was all from his hemorrhoids and no big deal. Plus on Friday the dentist who was clearing him for transplant did a “deep cleaning” which made him bleed like crazy.

But Saturday he got worse and Sunday he was -super- exhausted and said he had more bloody stool so I called the transplant team and they agreed he should go to the ER yesterday which he did...

...and now he’s admitted to my hospital with a hemoglobin of 6.1 which only bumped to 6.4 after two units of blood. Dropping from 8.5 to 6.1 in 4 days is pretty impressive but he’s been here almost 24 hours and they still haven’t figured out what is bleeding or how to stop it. Frustrating. I’m guessing that whatever is causing the “CEA 14.6” thing I mentioned last post is what’s bleeding but it just seems so long to be getting it sorted out. I’m assuming he’s got colon cancer and braced for it to be worse than just superficial malignant transformation of a polyp. That would be the best, of course, and if there were big ugly matted lymph nodes those would have showed up on the CT scan and/or MRI he got in April but it still could be anything in between the two. I’m assuming he’s gonna have to have a colon surgery and hoping like hell my guys don’t mess up anything and can pull him through, bleeding risk and all.

But we aren’t even there yet; we are still just pumping him full of blood and fluids. And after getting special dispensation to stay over (visiting hours are 9a - 9p) I’m exhausted. Had a quick trip home for shower/change but now I’m back and waiting for the docs to round so I can find out what the plan for the day will be. He’s finally sleeping so I’d love to duck over to my office for a while but then I will miss the plan. Healthcare is frustrating.

-later-

Turns out he -does- have C Diff. Also all his numbers are getting worse not better. Plan today is new IV and if not then central line. CT scan of belly. Plasma and vitamin K to lower INR. If things keep getting worse then transfer to Rochester. This is all scary and awful.  And yeah, chance of death is very high.

I have never been stretched as thin as I am right now. Fortunately I was smart enough to get off the emotional rollercoaster drinking causes -before- all this went down and I am so glad. I just don’t know how I would have managed any of this if I had still been drinking.  At least now I can focus on “what’s the next thing I have to do?” and “how can I -not- have an emotional breakdown?”

In sobriety I developed a deeply personal but meaningful spiritual practice so that helps but hardly enough.