When he woke up on Monday feeling crummy and weak, I told him that he should message Doctor Sborov's team to let them know. We weren't too concerned and figured it was just everything catching up. For his daily chemo med he takes it for three weeks with one week off to allow his body to recover. The last few days are the toughest, and often when his hemoglobin and other blood markers are super low. We knew we likely wouldn't hear from them until the next day, but we were OK with that. After trying better to describe what was wrong, they felt it was important to be seen, so we requested to be seen up at the main Huntsman. I knew there was a pretty good chance he would be admitted so I grabbed the "go bags" I had been working on re-packing in the car and helped him out to the car. He was so very weak and struggling, and I was so grateful for the timing of purchasing our new vehicle. He slept comfortably most of the way and was able to slide out of the leather seats into a wheelchair at valet. I was grateful the assistance in getting him where he needed to be.
Situated in the ACC they ran some labs, and did xrays and an EKG. The labs came back and the culprit...calcium.... again! His levels weren't quite as low as they had been a week ago, but still flagged as "LL". All of the calcium he had been taking and the milk he had been drinking were not enough. :P It took hours of just waiting to get assigned a room, but they gave him an infusion of calcium which made a huge difference. Not knowing when he would get a room assignment I decided to leave the hospital for a bit and get me some yummy food from the Pie. Waiting ended up being worth the room, we got an amazing room! It was huge (especially for a hospital room) and even had a separate sitting room with fridge, microwave and TV for me. The rooms at Huntsman are much nicer than the UofU and this one takes the cake. My brother came for a visit and shared pictures and videos of my cute niece. Baby giggles are wonderful for the soul! Then we settled in for what we knew to expect to be a long night. Blood tests and calcium IV's every 2 hours, all night. This time they had him hooked to a oxygen monitor which went off all night, anytime he would start to doze off. Normal is 95-100, anything under 90 is low. His would drop as low as the 60's last night, even while on oxygen. Luckily we had a very attentive nurse and a respiratory therapist who were very concerned and worked hard to figure out what needed to be done to keep his levels from dropping. We don't think it's calcium related just the joys of trach life. The hot summer air is irritating and with the smoke in the air, his airway is likely very irritated.
It was a long day with lots of people in and out all day, including my good friend Rachel who stopped by at lunch and brought us a treat. Chris asked all day for them to let him go home and we weren't sure if it would work out. However after one last "super powered" infusion (a different type of calcium with 3x the punch) and one last set of labs to wait for they finally felt comfortable proceeding with discharge. Took a lot to get things in place and had he not been persistent from the beginning, I'm sure we would be spending another night, but we are so glad to have the luxury of sleeping at home.
Today starts his week off from all of his chemo meds, and while we hoped to better utilize this "break in the clouds", we'll be grateful just to have time to re-coup. He has a friend coming up from St. George who will be a great for his morale. They want to watched his calcium levels more closely out patient (since the 3rd time is not the charm in this case) so we'll be back at the hospital soon. But for now, we're very grateful to be home again.
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