Hospital Stay

Norm here again..

Some of you already know, and for those that don't we had Tami admitted to Decatur Memorial Hospital on Wed. The pain had just gotten too much and it just wasn't fair to Tami to continue trying to battle it on her own at home. I am glad that we finally took this step although I dont take any credit for it, Tami's sister Deb gave the shove in the right direction.

Anyways, we got here on Wed and they went ahead and drew blood and did a CT scan and hooked Tami up to a pain pump. Her tummy, as always was bloated to a large size, with what we can only assume is gas. Anyways we got the blood results back a short time after they took them. Her Hemoglobins were quite low and they wanted to do a blood transfusion. At first I was ok with it till I really started to think about it. They drew the blood from her port and we have never gotten accurate results from her port. When they came back to draw a sample from her arm to cross match for donors we demanded that they re-test her blood. The nurse at the time said there was no way that the sample from her port was bad, and that even if it was different, it would not be different enough to stop her from having a transfusion. Of course, me and Tami won this bet and her blood came back fine and they canceled the transfusion, after 17 months these medical professionals should give us a little credit for being professionals ourselves. I believe the nurse owes Tami 25 cents, we are still waiting to be paid ;).

The CT scan results came back much later in the day. Dr Perdekamp was the on to delivery these, and they were not good at all. The liver and pelvis tumors had grown at a large rate. To make this news worse, the Dr felt that are options had become limited as well as Tami's time. It was like finding out Tami had cancer all over again, that same initial feeling of helplessness that you feel at the beginning of the journey when you dont know what the future holds, basically the punch to the stomach again. The Dr basically said that she had a couple weeks if we did nothing for her pain, and that if she had an ileostomy she might get a month (I heard a month or two, Tami heard a month). To top this all off, here we are in the hospital, and Tami really doesn't feel much better pain wise, it is so deflating to be where you think Tami will get help only to see they aren't able to offer much more than stronger pain meds.

To add to the issues, with such heavy pain meds going in, Tami's bladder started to act up. They decided to put a catheter in and help her urinate. Of course that added extra issues, Tami started getting pains and bladder spasms. They had to add 2 more meds to her already ridiculous list of meds. It seems like the nurses are coming in all the time to give her meds (least when we dont have to remind them) add in enemas, laxatives, etc, well what a frustrating mess, I am at wits end most times, and cant even imagine where Tami is most of the time.

So here we are, trying to decide the best path once again. These choices just seem to get tougher all the time. I will try and keep the updates flowing faster than I had been, but I wont promise anything right now. Currently we are at Decatur Memorial in room 5172 (217-876-5172). Its possible we might be transfered to St Mary's as DMH doesn't do the pain pump procedure. It just depends on what we decide on. I will update if we move. Tami doesn't mind calls or visits, although she doesn't always feel up to chatting.

I will update everyone as soon as I can, send some good vibes our way.