(written by Sunny)
When I spoke with Dr. Kuhn on Sunday (March 8th) evening she was very concerned about the amount of pain Lindsie had been experiencing. We had an appointment set with Dr. Kuhn for Monday for Lindsie's radiation simulation, which we were going cancel since as of Friday radiation was not part of Lindsie's treatment plan. Dr. Kuhn said that with the amount of pain Lindsie was in she needed to go ahead with radiation and chemo would have to wait. So, the plan changed again.
Dr. Kuhn had us adjust Lindsie's meds in hopes of making her more comfortable through the night. She then wanted us to bring Lindsie in first thing in the morning to the office in Meridian instead of waiting for the already scheduled afternoon appointment. There she would do her radiation simulation and possibly give her IV drugs for pain. I hoped that with the high amount of drugs Lindsie had going through her we'd be able to get her off the bed in the morning.
When I showed up to pick up Lindsie the next morning (March 9th) she had gotten herself showered and dressed which was an accomplishment all on its own. The problem was that she had sat herself down in a chair in a kind of awkward, sideways position with one leg under her. She was high, nauseated, and still in pain. She tried for 15 minutes to get out of the chair. It was impossible. When Josh got out of the shower he came out to help. After another 5 or so minutes he was able to lift her out of the chair and essentially carry her to the van. When I got her to the hospital a nurse came out to help her into a wheelchair, which was a process all in itself. While I parked the van the nurse took Lindsie inside to wait for me to take her to the MSTI clinic. When I walked in 1 minute later Lindsie was being checked into the ER. She was just too sick to go to the clinic.
Lindsie had also been scheduled to have an echocardiogram Monday morning because one of the chemo drugs she would be receiving can cause heart problems and they wanted to make sure she wasn't at risk. We missed the echo because we were in the ER. We were there from 8:30 in the morning until about 2:30 in the afternoon. They gave her fluids, pain killers, anti-nausea meds, did an MRI to make sure nothing had changed in her spine (it hadn't), but there was no relief or progress. Her doctors decided she would need to be admitted to the hospital, but she'd have to go to Boise where the radiation machine was working. So, late that afternoon they loaded Lindsie into an ambulance and transferred her to St. Luke's Boise.
Lindsie was really doped up and while it took the edge off the most intense pain it wasn't helping enough to justify keeping her that drugged. Lindsie hated the feeling and was pretty miserable. Once she was admitted she asked her nurses to taper down her meds. By Tuesday morning (10th) she was a little more with it. Movement was still extremely difficult and painful and she wasn't really eating much. Lindsie's medical oncologist, Dr. Bridges, dropped by early that morning and told her that chemo would be put off until the end of radiation, at which point we would regroup. Lindsie was scheduled for her radiation sim that morning and actual radiation later that afternoon.
Getting Linds to her sim was a trial in and of itself. She would have to be moved from her bed to either a wheelchair or another bed, transported downstairs to radiation, then moved onto the radiation table. There was no good way to do it. Using a board to pull her from one bed to the other hadn't been good when the ambulance had transported her so she was nervous about that. She decided to walk from her bed to a stretcher to be taken down to radiation. Just that movement of having to get up and down exhausted her and caused pain. Once we got down to radiation she thought she'd try it again, but when she got herself sitting on the radiation table she could not lay down. Any way she tried to move it was painful. After many attempts she decided to walk back to the stretcher, lay down on it (easier because the stretcher can begin in a sitting position and slowly be lowered to lying down), and let the staff pull her on a backboard from the stretcher to the table. What a process!
After the simulation, where they marked her body to know exactly where the radiation would go she had to go back to the stretcher. They decided to pull her again, but somebody yanked too hard and they sent her back into a series of spasms. I kinda wanted to punch somebody in the throat. When we got back to her room she chose to walk from the stretcher to her bed, which was once again a slow and painful process. As you can imagine Linds was exhausted after all that. To top it off, later that day she had the actual treatment and she had to do it all again. I wasn't allowed back with her that time and I worried about them moving her, especially since the tech immediately banged her bed into the wall as soon as they rolled her away. And to think she'd have to do it again the next morning. No rest for the weary!
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