from those who understand...
The last five days have been just awful.
Saturday I got to the hospital to see my dad and bonusmom (Age 48, Stage IV, metastatic to bones, nonsmoker, never exposed to chemicals) and she was completely out of it behaving much like a dementia patient.
They thought it was a reaction/side effect to the fentanyl patch from her kidney stint replacement Thursday morning.
They ran blood work and found her potassium, sodium, iron, blood pressure and oxygen levels were all beyond low (each of which could have caused dementia behavior independently for being as low as they were).
Sunday morning at 4am I received a phone call because she had, during a hallucination (while the nurse was in the room trying to stop it) ripped out one of her kidney stints (on the "good" side w/ the non-blocked kidney).
In attempting to bring those back to normal, more tests were run and we were told she has sepsis, an infection in her blood, that they are treating her for now. They've also done an advanced kidney stint procedure that puts them more "internally" placed to her system (I've not yet figured out what that is...obviously more focused on the sepsis issue). The sepsis and everything else also led to her body being labeled as "going toxic."
We were TOLD everything was actually looking up and the dementia-effect would subside soon...and now its three days later and its actually worse than it was before.
The doctor didn't seem to think this had an impact on the treatment or plans to refer her out to JH and Georgetown for 2nd and 3rd opinions...but then, of course, I called the nurses desk to check on her last night and the nurse said.
"This is all so sad. I can't imagine how it must be for your family to have things go downhill so quickly. I'm not one to mess in a patients spirituality but you should know she talks like she's going to go and fight this and win and, well, I am just sayin' its not MY place to say anything to her and I'm not one to get into a patient and their Lord."
So I'm now, of course, obsessing on this one person's negativity and worried I'm not seeing the forest through the trees right now...the severity of the sepsis, etc. I know its prolonging the chemo possibilities. I know if she'd started chemo the sepsis would have killed her two days ago.
Sometimes the being in the dark part is worse than just having it in writing what it is and what's going on.
>>>All this while I have a friend IMing me about needing lipo on her 129 lb frame b/c of skipping the gym two days in a row...(I need to defriend her, I'm aware now). MAN people's real colors come out when cancer comes around.<<<
