Calgon, Take Me Away!

Hello, friends!

Hope this post finds everyone happy and as pain and stress free as you can get!  After today, ANY little bit of relief I can get, I will welcome!

The day started off pretty good, my hubby called me at 7:00am from the hospital and he sounded FANTASTIC! Just like his usual self...no more slurring of his words and I could understand him the first time he told me things, no more having to go..."What, honey? I can't understand you!"  He tolerated the two units of blood that he got yesterday and they were drawing labs on him this morning to check his blood count.  I told him I would be at the hospital at 10am.  That's when things started going down hill...

Because of the medications I take (narcotics), I have a problem with constipation. I'm sure those of you that also take narcs have the same issues.  Well, my "issue" decided to relieve itself at 9:30am.  No problem, I thought. I have plenty of time. I wasn't dressed yet, but that takes me all of two seconds.  It's been so hot here, we Arizonans just grab whatever light shorts and shirt we can find and batabing...we are dressed!  Well, it's getting to be 9:45am and I'm still on the toilet. I couldn't exactly get off...no need to go into description here, I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.  It was so hard, it felt like the Sears Tower was coming out of my butt!  So I'm huffin' and puffin' and finally all is taken care of.  I go to flush, and the whole toilet plugs up. Wonderful!!  I can't do what I always do in these situations, which is call for my wonderful husband to come unplug the toilet for me. Because of my back and right leg, it is quite painful to stand over the pot and plunge with all I'm worth....which isn't much!  Anyway, I'm plunging and plunging and flushing and flushing, all the while pain and numbness and tingling are making trails all the way down my legs...yes, BOTH legs!  Finally, the stupid toilet unplugs and I can move on.  Yay!

I'm all sweaty and out of breath, but I manage to get into my "uniform" of shorts and a clean t-shirt.  I grab my purse, my tote bag and rush out into the living room to get my shoes on, all the while Jack is meowing his little head off.  I forgot to feed him! So I back track, feed the cat, put on my shoes, grab my stuff and I'm out the door into the oven blast of a state we call Arizona.  We have to park our car over across the street at the neighbors (the people who lived there died and their son is taking the house over and he lives in Flagstaff and doesn't mind us using his driveway) because if we park it by the house, it's under this tree that has birds with bad cases of diarrhea...just made the car look gross and my hubby and I saved long and hard for our beautiful Camry.  Anyway, I get to the car and dump everything inside and off I go.  I get to the hospital and luckily, I nabbed the LAST parking spot out front by the entrance. My right drivin' leg is killing me, of course and my low back is stinging from all the toilet plunging I had to do, but I managed to make it there in one piece. I park, then have to get the walker out of the trunk and fiddle with that for awhile. I lock up and away I go to my hubby's room.

I walk in and he looks as great as he sounds! I'll have to remember to bring the camera tomorrow and take a picture to post on the blog.  He still has the nasogastric tube and will have that until his colon wakes up....which it hasn't done yet. What is it, in hibernation? Anyway, he keeps dropping things on the floor and has already lost the chap stick I gave him yesterday from my own personal collection...and I loved that chap stick, too!  We never did find it...or shall I say, I never did find it.  But I did collect the TV remote and a few other items off the floor.  Whew, I can finally sit and relax.

The doctor comes in and looks at Frankie's incision and it's all bruised, with a little blood clot over the troublesome naval area I reported about in my last post.  It made my knees weak to look at that incision.  The surgeon said it looked good, though, and kept it covered.  Then he said that Frankie's red blood cell count is STILL low, 7.9, and he would need two more units of blood today.  He can't do the walk while the blood is running, so there went my plan of having him up more today and walking! 2 units can take up to 8 hours to infuse and I would be back home by then.  So I was bummed out about his lab and needing more blood. The surgeon thinks it's the Gleevec he takes for his cancer (GIST) that is suppressing his bone marrow. I have other ideas, as he has been taking the Gleevec for almost 7 years now and hasn't had his count get this low. I think he lost a lot in surgery, but of course they didn't record the amount in the chart according to the doctor so we don't know what to go on!!  He said that if these two units don't bring his count up, then they would start to investigate for a bleed somewhere. I asked if that involved more surgery, and he said they would start with a CT scan first and take it from there.  But Frankie doesn't LOOK like he's losing blood...no paleness and his incision is no longer bleeding, either.  So I don't know...he'll have more labs tomorrow and we'll see then.

I stayed until about 6:30pm and started home to crash....on the computer, of course. I miss having the computer during the day!  I started something very exciting...my own Facebook Fibromyalgia Support Group...so if you have fibro and are interested in the group, please feel free to visit the page and join. The link is up above, the group badge picture below Jesus. :0)  I kept it a closed community due to all the crack pot people out there and I wanted to keep our group private and "homey."  So just click join and I'll confirm it on my end and you are then a member of my group!!  Cool, huh?  I hope it's a big success!! I removed the FibromyWHAT? fan page so I could do the group instead. I kept getting comments about "how to join" and a lot of people wanted to be part of a group. So I deleted the page and made a group.  That's me, the ever people pleaser! LOL....

My eyes are bleary, so I'm gonna call it a night. Hope you all have a good one and stay healthy.
Until next post,
Missy