Well, it's not going to kill you

For your viewing pleasure

While we wait for tomorrow and it's test results to come because if there's ANYTHING I've learned during our medial crises is don't worry until there's something to worry about.

With that in mind I present for your viewing pleasures the boys...

LR in the landlord mode

Ted in all his furry glory.

Ted & Alex - Ted is orange and Alex is black.  They worship and adore one another.  I rescued Alex from our road when he was a tiny kitten.  It's been 14 years and he still has feral cat in him.  Ted showed up while we were on vacation a few years ago.  He's the sweetest loving little guy .  I'm sure some one dropped him on the property.

Max the very spoiled dog breaking the rules.

 

and the girls ...

Sophie

And my friend Barb and Me taken Aug 5

Barb and I used to work together.  We started as clerks and worked our way up to budget analysts.  The company went through many changes and Barb nows works for one of the changes in Richmond, VA

and just because ...

The great wall of Mill Creek.  We had this built a few years ago.  It's footing go into the ground 1 Ft.  That wall is going nowhere.  The house may eventually go down but the wall never will.

Medical Issues Pt 3

So it's now Oct 2000.  The great GI doc discovers the varicose veins.  LR is put on medication to lower his blood pressure.

That works until the end of April 2001.  LR then starts having spontaneous bleeding, vomiting blood.  Off to the ER we go.  Into the hospital he goes, gets 4 units of blood and sent home after 3 days.

The end of June the same thing happens.  He gets 1 unit of blood and spends 5 days in the hospital.   The only difference this time is the  asshole doc rotating through GI accuses him of being an alcoholic and implies that I'm neglectful because he started  bleeding and I wasn't home.  It took several tries before his oncologist convinced the GI doc that LR wasn't an alcoholic it was a result of his cancer.  Funny the bad GI doc never apologized  to either of us.  Oh what a surprise.

Kaiser Santa Rosa sends him to Kaiser Oakland for a procedure that should help.  Only they discover after an ultrasound and angiogram they can't do it because the vein to his liver is completely blocked.

We come back home and wait for his regular doc to get back from vacation.  Unfortunately  on July 18 bleeding starts again.  Bad bleeding, really, really bad bleeding.  This time he ends up in ICU and get 6 units of blood.  The  nice doc who was taking care of him explains if he starts bleeding again they won't be able to do any thing about it and he'll probably die.

So the nice doc is going to contact the liver transplant team at UCSF to see if they will evaluate LR.  They agree but they need to find a bed before he can be transferred.  2 days later a bed is available.  LR is told he'll be transported at 3 pm because they need to order up a special ambulance.  He calls and relays the info.  I tell him I'll be there at noon.  I arrive at ICU, use the phone to get permission to come in and am told "oh you can walk with him to the elevator".   Since neither of us expected this we both distressed.  I ride down in the elevator, they place in the the ambulance and we kiss goodbye not knowing if we'll see each other again.  I managed not to cry because I didn't want to add to his already considerable stress.  The ambulance doors close and I'm standing there in complete shock.  I got in the car and drove the 5 minutes to where my friend was working.  She was with a customer but asked if I was OK.  I shook my head no and completely lost it.

LR arrives at UCSF, after directing the ambulance driver because he was heading the wrong direction, is place in ICU then a few hours later transferred to the liver transplant floor.

2 days later after much testing, poking, prodding and consultations he's scheduled for surgery.  It gets canceled twice because livers come in and getting them transplanted is a priority.  He finally goes in some time between 5 and 6 pm.  They tell me that is will take about 4 hours because they first need to get through the scar tissue from his other surgeries.

The transplant doc arrives in LR's room around 10 pm.  Yea, UCSF let's you wait in the patient's room.  Kaiser makes you wait in a waiting room.  Any way the doc explains that they couldn't do the surgery they were planning (deja vu).  Instead they did a surgery that was pioneered in Japan.  They removed his spleen because that was part of the surgery they had planned.  They they cut open his esophagus and stripped the veins.

Because it was so late the recovery room was not staffed so LR was being held in post-op.   They kept telling me I could see him in about an hour.  It was finally midnight and only because I was driving the nurse nuts that I got to see him.  The first thing he said to me was "they stuck me and it HURT!!!"  Turns out that his lung had collapsed, a common occurrence when you have to lie on your side during surgery, and the stuck something in him to get it re inflated with no pain meds.

He had 12 very. long. days. of. recovery.  He was ready to go after about 8 but kept getting a fever so they wouldn't release him.  His roommate had a liver transplant the day after LR had his surgery.  LR was DETERMINED to get out of the hospital before Bruce.  The day before LR was finally released, the resident had promised that he would be released that day.  Unfortunately another fever and the resident was off that day.  A few minutes later I walked by his office and said thanks then, laughed and said "you don't have to spend the rest of the day with him!!!"

So that's the end of the medical saga until his test on Thursday.  Please keep us in your prayers.

Thanks for being here Internets. From the beginning it's been wonderful to "talk" to all of you from my diagnosis through today.

Yea for a GREAT Kaiser Doc

Larry's GI doc is a wonderful guy.  During one of LR's many near death experiments the doc took me aside and gently questioned whether Larry had a health directive "just in case" and explained what LR had decided really meant.  He then said "if he dies, I'll kill him".

Anyway the wonderful Doc called a bit ago and told LR he's putting is file on the top of his desk to try and get him in sooner.  Kaiser scheduling just called, the test that was scheduled for Nov 28 is now scheduled for Nov. 1.

Of course on the down side that means that he's worried about LR's state.

Medical Issues Pt 2

I forgot to mention by the time surgery rolled around LR was the color of a manilla envelope.  So after 3 days in the ICU he was transferred to a regular room.  We were both nervous but were assured everything would be fine.

I left him that night explaining that I was going to leave the dog with Deb & Fred and disconnect the phone so I could get some much needed sleep.  I went home and crashed at 7:30.  Around 11:00 I wake up to some one knocking on the front door.  It's our tenant, Larry had called her because he knew the phone was unplugged.  He called because he was hot and the nurse was ignoring this fact.  Larry doesn't do hot well.

I realized I'm going to have to go to the hospital to try to calm him down.  But I also realize it's way past visiting hours and Kaiser is VERY RIDGED regarding visiting hours.  So I had the brilliant idea to call Deb & Fred.  I knew no one would give me grief with 6'7" Fred behind me.  I drive to their house, meet them outside and promptly break into tears.  I was so tired I almost couldn't function.  Deb slapped me and said I can only deal with one crisis at a time.  Yes my dear friend slapped me, but it worked.

Of to the hospital we go.  The nurse, who had been ignoring him, said to me "see I knew he just wanted to see you".  Fortunately I was too tired to try and kill her.

We break into action.  Fred goes hunting for a fan.  Deb and I open the windows and get ice cubes (the nurse and I use that term very loosely told us we couldn't go in the kitchen, we ignored her) and soak towels to put on him.  Then we take more towels and fan him.  Mean while there are no fans to be found so Fred heads out to a 24 Hour Safeway.  He finds a fan and returned to the hospital to find all the doors locked.  He found the maintenance entrance and came in that way.

The nurse said you can't use that fan without maintenance permission, mind you it's now after 1 am, so we ignored her again.  LR was very agitated so I ordered asked the nurse to call his doc and get him some Ativan.  BIG MISTAKE only I didn't know that until the next morning.

About this time they put another person in his room.  It was an older gentleman and he was on suicide watch.  His son said it was too cold in the room and we needed to shut the windows.  I politely told him over my dead body.  Deb and Fred leave and I hang around til the Ativan arrives and LR calms down.

I get home around 3 am, plug in the phone and go to bed.  At 7:30 the phone rings, it's an aide at Kaiser who says your husband asked me to call.  Ok it's a bit strange that he didn't call me himself but who knows.  He gets on the phone and tells me he can't move his hands or feet, WTF???  I tell him I need to talk to the aide.  She explains that LR had a bad reaction to the Ativan, tried to pull his drains out, pulled off her glasses and other exciting adventures.  So they had used restraints on his arms and legs.  I convince her to undue the leg restraints and say I'll be there as fast as I can.

When I arrive he's looking very wounded and can't figure out why he can't move his hands.  The next few days are much better and after 15 days in the hospital he's finally released.  He gets better and we get married in Sept.

Thus concludes Larry's medical adventures for 1999.  But there's still more to come...

More medical issues

Because God knows we haven't had any for at least 3 months!

LR has not been feeling well for a few weeks.  He's been tried, dizzy and gets out of breath easily.  I knew he was really feeling bad when he made a doctors appointment with out me nagging him.  The doc listened to his complaints and ordered up a chest x-ray.  It came back fine so the next step was blood work.  It didn't come back fine.  LR is very anemic, so much so that he's taking iron twice a day.  The doc is concerned that the varicose veins in his esophagus may be leaking.  That is not a good thing.  Last time it happened he was vomiting blood and almost died.

How he came to have varicose veins in his esophagus in a long story.  I'll share the short version with you now.

LR was diagnosed with colon cancer Feb. 15, 1994.  In working him up for surgery it was discovered that the cancer had spread to his liver.  Kaiser did the colon surgery then sent him to UCSF* so they could deal with his liver.  The UCSF docs decided to perform surgery as the tumors were just in one lobe of his liver.  The surgery was risky with a 15% of dying on the table.  During that surgery the discovered more colon tumor and that the liver tumors were too deep to remove safely. 

Has it happened UCSF had an experimental program studying colon that spread to the liver cancer treatment.  They installed a port in his amdomium that delivered the chemo drugs directly to his liver.  An interesting side note:  the first port failed.  When we visited the Kaiser oncologist he said "well you're going to die anyway".  The UCSF docs had told us if we had any problems, clearly implying Kaiser problems, to let them know.  We called them about the port, a new port was installed a week later.  And we insisted on a new oncologist as well.  2 1/2 years of weekly chemo ensued and all was well.

That is until we decided to go to France for 3 weeks.  The port had been left in "just in case".  Every 2 weeks LR went in an had a heparin solution injected in the port to keep the catheter portion open.  Since we were going to be gone for 3 weeks something had to be changed.  The Kaiser Infusion Center nurses called UCSF to find out what might work.  They got the answer and tried.  Unfortunately it was a disaster.  LR ended up with massive, and I do mean massive, internal bleeding.

Then came the day of we entered the ninth circle of hell.  He was bleeding but the docs didn't know where it was coming from.  The GI docs called in the surgeon.  He immediately wanted to perform surgery but LR WAS BLEEDING so I was informed he would probably die on the table.   As you can imagine that was rather stressful news, I spent the rest of  day sitting at the head of his pre-op bed just above his head so he could not see me cry.

For most of a day the GI doc and the surgeon battled it out.  He was going to surgery, he wasn't, he was, he wasn't.  You get the idea.  They made a final (yeah right) decision that he wasn't going to have surgery so I sent all our friends who had been there to support us all day home.

Not 5 minutes after they'd left the surgeon decides once again LR is going to surgery.  I raced to the nearest phone and left a message with my friend Penny's husband to please send her right back to the hospital because I couldn't go through this alone.

Shortly after Penny arrived the decision was changed once again.  LR had been getting transfusions all day but was losing so much blood that the docs called a hematologist in for consult.  He said send LR to ICU, pump him full of Vitamin K (helps with clotting) and do surgery the next day.  He ended up having 15 units of blood that day.

The next evening surgery was performed.  I had been told it would take 2 hours.  I had a terrific support team.  My sister had come up from Gilroy.  Along with her were Deb, Fred, Rob and Erin.  We waited patiently in the surgery waiting room.  At the 2 hour mark a nurse came out, only to tell us that it had taken the better part of 2 hours just to get through the scar tissue from his previous surgeries and it would be another 2 hours before they were done.

When the surgeon was finally finished he came to talk to me.  I could tell by his demeanor that things had gone well.  Since no one else had met Dr. K before they were convinced that LR was still going to die. Obviously he didn't but much hilarity ensued before he was released from the hospital

*UCSF, University of California at San Francisco

to be continued...

Tomorrow

will be the first of many clean up and organize days.  When my head is cluttered I need my surroundings to be neat.  I am not by nature a neat person so there are piles of paper, unread magazines, socks and such scattered through out the house.

I'm working on a series of posts explaining why my head is cluttered "coming soon to a space near you"

I'm not an eye for an eye kind of girl ...

but I might be swayed in the case of arsonists.

Tolerance

The phone rang just now and I let it go to the machine.  It was our very high maintenance tenant.  I just could not bring myself to talk to her because she's a whiner.  I think she was physically abused in the past.  She seems very beaten down but appears to gotten herself involved with, shall we just say, not the right person.

I find that since I was diagnosed I have MUCH less tolerance for extremely needy people.  I think it should be the other way after all I've been through but it's not.  I wonder if it's because I went through the trauma without much whining.  Ok so there were a few notable occasions when I lost it but for the most part I managed to keep my act together.

Thus I've admitted my character flaw for the day.  I know I have many more but this will do for now.

Sheer horror*

As you can see on TV, Southern California is burning to the ground.  Literally in some places.  This itself is not unusual this time of year.  The Santa Ana's come in this time of year and as a result there are fires every year.

What's unusual is the size and violence of the fires this year.  I feel so sorry for everyone effected by the fire.  We no longer know anyone who lives in Southern Ca.  Our friends that did live there retired and moved up here a couple of years ago.

But a bit selfishly I'm worried because they're sending firefighter and rigs from here.  Even thought we've had a nice bit of rain we're still in the worst part of fire season.  Removing resources from Northern Ca to Southern Ca is a routine every year during this season.  But we've had drought problems this year that leave us particularly vulnerable. 

I'm keeping all appendages crossed.

*yes I actually have a brain I just can't spell worth a damn.

Max a few minutes ago

Dad's  going  outside, we're going to play.  No he's going to the truck, we're  going somewhere.   It's the leash, OMG  IT'S. THE. LEASH!!!!!!

We're going for a walk, can you even believe it, we're going for a walk!!!

Mind you this dog lives on forty acres and has ten acres that he's allowed to walk on his own.  But, OMG the leash.