On Second Thought, Don't Do That

A few days after being released from my last hospital stay I had an office visit with a new cardiologist in Gotham City. I haven’t given him a nickname yet, I’ll come up with something after I get to know him a little better. The visit went well and I was satisfied with his understanding of my multiple problems. The following day featured a blood test and an office visit with Dr. Whoosh’s NP, which went well also. I’m now scheduled to resume my frequently postponed chemotherapy on August 1^st.

The next afternoon I received a telephone call from one of Dr. Whoosh’s nurses telling me that they had consulted with the new cardiologist and between the two of them had decided to try stopping a couple of my medications due to a high value on my creatinine level on the blood test. Remember that my last hospital visit involved a week of tinkering with my medicines to get me back on my feet. The result of those changes had me feeling much better and I had resumed losing weight. Well, they’re the doctors, so I stopped two of my medications.

Overnight I gained 8.5 pounds and my blood pressure fell into the basement. After playing phone tag with doctors and automated answering machines for a couple of hours, I was told what I sort of knew already. Resume taking the medicines! About 24 hours later, I’m back on track having lost 2.5 of the 8.5 I gained (losing is always harder than gaining). My blood pressure is still a little low but trending upwards towards normal.

Medicine is not an exact science…

Another Extended Stay

I had another appointment with Dr. Whoosh in Gotham on July 6^th.  Following my last hospital visit, my shortness of breath had returned with a vengeance. When he asked me about it, I expressed great concern and explained that I could hardly breathe after only walking a short distance. He put a pulse oximeter on my finger and had a nurse walk me around for a minute or so. My SpO2 level stayed around 95% and when I sat down the nurse quickly took the meter off my finger. I protested and had her put it back on. Immediately the reading dropped to 70% as I started gasping for air. This raised a few eyebrows to say the least. After consulting with Dr. Whoosh, he recommended I go back into the hospital to see what was going on.

After waiting a couple of hours, they found me a bed in New Arkham Hospital. At first glance you’d never guess it was a hospital. It looked more like an airport terminal. A gigantic lobby with comfortable chairs all around, lots of chrome and wood, wide hallways and rooms that (except for a hospital bed and medical equipment sitting around) appeared to be more suited to a four star hotel. I was impressed. The view from the 18^th floor was spectacular. The other side of the hospital looked out over Gotham University Stadium. I ended up staying for a week while they tinkered with my medicines. The New Arkham is a teaching hospital, so dozens of doctors trooped in and out of my room with interns and students following them like little ducklings. I felt like I was the guy with the mystery disease in an episode of "House." While there I certainly received the royal treatment. I hate to think what it’s going to cost my insurance company…or what my copay is going to be. In the end they took me off of a couple heart medications and doubled my diuretic. I’ve been peeing like clockwork about every 45 minutes or so and since they admitted me I’ve lost another 22 pounds. It’s helped my breathing dramatically, I can get up and move around much easier, and have stopped using a wheelchair for the time being unless I have to go a long distance. I’m feeling tremendously better and am praying that I don’t have a relapse. I have three followup appointments in Gotham this week, I think we're going to get a hotel room and stay there a couple of days instead of spending four hours a day driving back and forth.

If you’ve ever been admitted to a hospital, they have probably given you an insulated, graduated, plastic mug for your water so they can record your fluid intake. So I got one of those with a plastic lid and a plastic bendy straw sticking out of it. On the outside of the lid was printed “Do Not Twist Lid.” Although there was a little door you could twist to close the drinking holes, I understood that they meant not to try twisting the entire lid to remove it. To remove it you had to pry it loose, which wasn’t easy, it fit very tightly. Upon opening it, I discovered the ubiquitous legal disclaimer printed on the bottom of the lid, “Caution: Contents May Be Hot.” 

Who was the genius that decided that the warning needed to be printed on the INSIDE of the tight fitting lid? Although the mug was being used for ice water, had it contained a hot liquid, I would have likely burnt my fingers removing the lid before ever being able to read the warning. A serious lack of thought going into your design here folks.

An Insect Jihad

Summer has arrived and with the heat comes a Mongol horde of Musca domestica. Common houseflies intent on making contact with human skin as many times as they can during their pitifully short lifespan. I could be wearing long pants, a long sleeved shirt, gloves, and a Luchador mask that only exposed the tip of my nose and a pester fly would still try to land on my nose at least twice within 30 seconds of being released in the room. In a house with 4 adults and 2 grandkids, keeping the outside doors closed all the time does not appear to be a viable option to stem the tide. The only things I’ve found that makes them disappear reliably are flypaper strips and fly swatters. They won’t go within a 2 foot radius of a flypaper strip. Put a fly swatter in your hand and they head for the hills until you lay it down again. Then they’re back like insane little Kamikaze flying raisins trying to martyr themselves in the belief that they will be met at heaven’s pearly screen door by 72 nubile maggots eager to do unspeakably disgusting things to their proboscis. Is it obvious that I don’t like flies?

On my health issues, I visited Dr. Poirot, my local pulmonologist last week and had another 1.7 liters of fluid drawn off my right lung. I’ve decided to call him Dr. Poirot due to his uncanny resemblance to David Suchet, best known for portraying Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. The thoracentesis (lung fluid draining) helped for a few days, but I already seem to be clogging up again and having difficulty breathing. I see Dr. Whoosh, my oncologist in Gotham City, this coming Wednesday and am scheduled to resume the chemotherapy treatments. I keep telling people its immunotherapy, not chemotherapy, but everyone continues to say “chemo,” so I’ve decided to just give up and go along with it. This will be my first treatment since mid-April. The infusion is supposed to be done every two weeks, so it’s been a long dry spell akin to starting from scratch. I’m hoping this time we’ll be able to stay on schedule and it will slow down the cancer growth the way it’s supposed to.

Several kids from church and a few of the deacons showed up a week ago and did a bunch of yard work and completed building the patio that my wife has been diligently working on for about four years. They all deserve a pat on the back, great job! We have no big plans to celebrate on Independence Day since everyone is busy with other things on the 4^th. On Friday we grilled some pork chops on the new patio, I think that’s going to be the extent of the festivities.

That’s it until later.

The Revolutionary "Family Hub"

One of the more useless “high-tech” products recently being advertised on TV is the Samsung “Family Hub” refrigerator. The ideal companion for your smart phone, at a suggested retail price of just under a budget busting $7000, it’s the smart, Internet friendly fridge with three amazing cameras inside! Now you can check what’s chillin' on your iPhone while you walk through the supermarket frozen food aisle. Really? Do I really need something like this? I guess it might be handy if I had a fridge like the one in their demo photos. 

Their entire sample refrigerator contains: 

• 2 bottles of pop
• 1 small cake
• 1 bowl of fruit(?)
• 1 small plate of what looks like a desert
• 1 bowl of green stuff with cherry tomatoes
• 2 deviled eggs on a plate

Who has a fridge like that? I suppose if you live alone, eat out a lot, and don't cook much...maybe. But with a fridge that contains only 6 things do you really need to double check it when you make your once-a-month trip to the supermarket? Particularly when you're probably just there to buy a 6 pack of beer.

Out of curiosity, I went to our fridge just now and made a list of what’s in it:

• 1 small container of ham salad
• 1 large container of cole slaw, half eaten
• 1 ½ gallons of milk
• A pitcher of water with celery sticking out of it.
• 3 steaks thawing
• 1 foil covered bowl (I think it's leftover pork barbecue)
• ½ pan of dried out chocolate pudding desert, at least a week old
• 1 large watermelon
• 4 bottles of pop
• 5 cartons of low-carb chocolate protein shake 
• 2 egg cartons (how many eggs inside unknown)
• 1 large tub of cream cheese
• 1 large tub of cottage cheese
• 1 large tub of sour cream
• 1 tub of Cool Whip
• 2 lb. butter
• 2 packages shredded cheese
• 2 jars mayonnaise
• 1 jar grape jelly
• 1 jar salsa
• 1 jar pickle relish
• 1 bottle steak sauce
• 1 bottle Sriracha sauce
• 1 bottle soy sauce
• 1 bottle ketchup
• Several bottles of salad dressing in assorted flavors
• 6 ears of corn
• 1 bottle of coffee creamer
• 2 crisper drawers full of wilted veggies
• 3 vials of insulin

If there were three cameras in our fridge, do you know what you’d see? A half empty jug of milk, a watermelon and a pitcher of celery.

Not Much Happening

It's been a little while since I last posted, so I thought I'd drop in and do a quick update. Not much going on since my last post. I had a CT scan a couple of weeks ago and visited Dr. Whoosh's office for an update. Got to talk to his NP, he was out of town. My cancer is still growing and they want me to see a pulmonologist in Gotham that caters to cancer patients to investigate my shortness of breath. Possible that they may try drawing off some more fluid. That's a week from today, then back to Dr. Whoosh a week later. If I've learned nothing else over the last two years, it's that doctors don't get in a hurry to do anything. I've been having trouble loosing more weight. After my last trip to the hospital I lost about 15 pounds in about a week, then it just plateaued. Up and down a pound or two every day, I seem to have hit a glass floor. Every time I gain or loose more than 3 pounds, a nurse from home health care calls me to make sure I wasn't holding an anvil when I stepped on the scales. They get so uptight about a couple of pounds. I can understand if I was somewhere around my "ideal" weight. Three pounds would be like gaining a second head. When you're as big as me, it's less than 1% of my body weight...I can just about fart real loud and loose that much weight. Hopefully I'll have more to report next time around.

Don't EVER Give Up!

When we left off, I was feeling much better but the local oncologist told me that the cancer drug I had been taking was not working and there were no other drugs that hadn’t been tried on me already. He set up an appointment with my original oncologist to see if there were any clinical trials available, but didn’t hold out much hope. He basically told me to go home and die, although not in so many words. While that was far from encouraging news, I was still upbeat at feeling better and happy to have escaped death’s ambush once again. I had accepted my fate months earlier and was at peace with it, but was in no hurry to finish the race.

So I went to see Dr. Whoosh in Gotham City again today to find out about any clinical trials. He came in the room with a frown on his face, which I thought meant that he agreed with the local guy’s opinion. He didn’t live up to my characterization of him today by spending nearly a half hour talking with me. While he was tactful and went to great lengths to say what a fine doctor the local guy is, in the end he thought his diagnosis was, to put it politely, total bull feathers.  He went over a list of items and essentially said that the cancer appeared to be barely different than it was when he last saw me about six months ago. I’m scheduled for a new CT scan in two weeks and a consult. If the new scan confirms his opinion I’ll probably be resuming treatment with the drug I was on earlier…this time under the care of Dr. Whoosh.

I feel like I’ve been on a roller coaster for the last couple of months. At death’s doorstep twice, placed in pallative care, talked to about hospice, poked and prodded for countless blood tests, scanned, and told there was no hope for me. On the other hand I’m feeling much better, I’ve lost about twenty pounds, my blood glucose is doing better than it has in several years, and I’ve been told the end is not as near as I was led to believe. Through it all I have had countless people praying for me and encouraging me in my struggle. God has intervened for me at least twice, and I suspect many times more than that. I ended one of my church bulletin articles a couple of years ago by asking God to strengthen my desire to pray. He has done that, and I believe He’s started answering my prayers more frequently as well.

Now for something completely different...

I’ve been promising to resume my humorous anecdotes and sarcastic commentary for a while, so I’ll tell a little tale on myself.  I own a lift chair. It’s like a La*Z*Boy recliner except it’s electric and will help stand you up if you’re unable to stand on your own. I don’t need it to stand up yet, but it does help my back and is very comfortable. I was relaxing in it a week or so ago and we had a power failure. Did you catch the part above where I said it was electric?  There’s no manual override. Battery backup you say? Yes, it does have two tiny 9 volt transistor batteries that are supposed to operate it ONE TIME in an emergency. You guessed it…they appeared to be dead as a pair of mackerels. Did I have extra batteries? Yes. Did I know where they were? Of course not. After spending a significant amount of time bemoaning my situation, I finally discovered that if I leaned forward as far as I could in my prone position, the chair would slowly move an inch or so when I pushed the correct button. After that effort, the batteries had to wait a while to recover. After several minutes of leaning and button pushing I finally had the chair up far enough that I could climb out of it. Do I know where the spare batteries are now? You betcha.