Hospital log day 22 -

The time portal, or black hole.

How do you manage to squeeze about 300 minutes into an hour? Oh it's so easy once you know how.

First... and this is critical... go to a hospital. After that it will take care of itself.

Let's go back to yesterday/last night... last night on Living at the Hospital Emmah needed to get a catheter placed so that she'd be ready for the scan today. Tried once... nope. Tried again... nope. Okay we'll try again in the morning. Morning comes and this time it was left to the doctors. A little screaming... and compared to last night, this was nothing... and bingo. That was at around 9am. The technician poked his head in the door to see how things were going... I guess he had a date or something... and muttered something like 10:00.

Ding dong... limo is here and away we go.

Start your stopwatch.

We get to the room and we're told that she'd have to lay flat on her back... motionless... for 45-50 minutes. I said that I mentioned to them last night that she was going to have to be sedated to do this. There was no way that she can sit still even if she's comfortable never mind being in pain and unable to lay flat. I told him that she had a hard enough time laying still enough for them to take a pic of the abdomen and that was less than a minute.

Well... we'd like to try.

Not without sedation sez I.

I said that we want the best pictures right? I can tell you that the best way is for her to be sedated. The way I see it is if we try this without sedation, she won't be able to be still let alone lay flat. So then you're going to have to do this a second time and the second time will be with sedation. Why don't we just cut to the chase here and sedate her now and get the best images without torturing her any further. That was the gist of it anyway. Why doesn't anyone listen to me? Don't go telling me about hospital policies and protocol and all that... I've been around it for the better part of three years now... I know all about it.

The clock continues to run...

A phone call is made, then another and another...

Eventually we got the right personnel in place, she was sedated and scanned. They were giving away free ultrasounds too, so they threw one of those in too. I also requested that they change her port needle (she was due today) while she was under. So that got done as well. For those keeping score on the time... a port needle change is a less than five minute ordeal when she's under. Then she has to be taken to recovery since she was put under... more waiting.

Leave the room around 10:30am and don't arrive back until 3:45pm.

Never has a 50 minute procedure taken so long. I could've driven to Cincinnati or St. Louis in that amount of time.

I'm suspecting that you're all wondering what came of the scan from today. The consensus is this... there isn't a consensus.

Okay, the dye they inject is timed to see how long it takes to make its way through and to the bladder. Emmah's was on the turtle side of the scale... not good. The ultrasound showed a slight decrease in right kidney size. So there have been, and will continue to be, pow wows on the best way to proceed. Right now, they are leaning potentially to placing two of the tubes out the back... each kidney getting it's own. It's quite the conundrum because on one hand, her creatinine level has dropped significantly... 3.9 to 1.1 today. There seems to be an ever so slight decrease in size according to to day's ultra sound. Then there's the sluggish movement of the dye indicating a blockage of some type.

I had inquired if placing the catheter and thus eliminating the reflux (as they call it) could have contributed to the slight decrease. Reflux in this setting is the urine's ability to wash back and forth unobstructed from the bladder to the kidney. Since we've bypassed her body's shut off on the ureter by placing the stents... they are now forced open allowing free flowing urine in there. The response I got was that that was something they were also talking about.

I don't expect to know anything before calling it a night tonight. Tonight will be about letting Emmah rest and get her pain back under control. All the moving around has left her pain quite elevated and compounding the pain issue is that she was off her pain med for a couple hours thus leaving her in a deficit. A few extra "squirts" and it looks like things have settled down some.

Sleep is most welcome... and so far she is welcoming it.

KEIYTAP