April and May 2011

In April I continued to have issues eating and keeping it in.  I was in and out of the hospital so many times.  More tests, more NG tubes, more CT scans and more x-rays.  The docs finally decided to put me on TPN which is a liquid feed bag with about 2000 calories of all the nutrients, electrolytes and vitamins I needed.  They put a PICC line in my left arm.  The PICC line connects with the feed bag line.  It goes for 12 hours so I usually do it over night.

One morning, my mom came over to help with the kids as she does every morning.  I was running a fever and it got up to 102.  I was hallucinating and had no strength.  My mom was calling my docs.  They were worried that my PICC line was infected as the line ends right by the heart.  They told her to get me to the hospital asap.  I could barely walk - which is a huge overstatement.  She got my walker and we got to the car door and before she could get me in I passed out on the driveway and my noggin took a huge hit on the concrete.  Thank goodness for the kindness of neighbors.  Between my mom and the neighbors they got me in the car.

This led to another hospital stay.  They took out the PICC line immediately to send it to the lab.  Turns out I just had a really bad UTI.  I stayed in for about 4 days.  I saw every doc under the sun.  They put in a new PICC line and sent me home back on TPN and IV antibiotics that also could be hooked up to the PICC line.

Things calmed down.  I just avoided eating.  Then at the end of April, I had my third intestinal block.  Back to the ER in extreme pain and nausea.  As they were admitting me to the ER - the smell of everything from the nurses' perfumes to the smell of the latex gloves made me so sick to my stomach.

This time around, I finally had surgery that they were trying to avoid.  The surgeon cut my lower abdomen open and went through every inch of my small intestine.  She removed 18 inches and resectioned my bowel.  I spent about a week in the hospital.  The recovery was tough.

The surgery took care of the tremendous abdominal pain but did not fix the fact that I can't retain solid foods.  My gastro doc said it is most likely that I will always have troubles with retaining food - which turns out to be true despite the meds they gave me to stave off loosing the food.  Another lovely side effect of radiation.

Throughout May, I continued to get UTIs.  I was on one antibiotic after another and nothing seemed to help.  More later -