Chapter 7: get ready - get set - wait

Today is September 30, 2014 and I am sitting at home going over the events of the last two days. You may remember that I mentioned my leaking feeding tube. Well, I went into the hospital to the special services department to meet with my surgeon's assistant. The plan was for her to replace my Mic-Key feeding tube since it has been in place for several months and we suspected it had a part in the leaking.

The tube I had in was an 18-French size. That's the diameter of the tube. We tossed around some alternatives and decided to go up to a 20-French unit. That should reduce the leakage some and if I am really lucky the leakage will be all but gone. The rest of the day the tube was leaking almost as bad as before we made the change.

I had supper and then changed the dressing and towel to get things dried out down there. This evening I have been drinking coke and as best I can determine the leaking has reduced. If that's the situation I have no earthly idea why. I guess I will see what's up when I change the dressing tomorrow morning.

Today I had an appointment to go in for another chemo treatment. I met with my oncologist's assistant for a follow-up after last week's treatment. In the course of our conversation I mentioned the problem with my feeding tube. She looked at the tube site and was concerned with the inflammation and suspected some infection. The chemo they were using can reduce the white blood count reducing the body's ability to fight infections. In light of that they decided to forego the treatment today and put it off for a couple of weeks. I went into the lab and had blood drawn to check the counts of red, white and platelets. Those seem to be significant when undergoing chemo treatment. Tomorrow I'm going to call in and have them send me the results of the labs.

Okay, both of my cats are in for the night and I'm getting a little bleary-eyed so I'm going to shut this down for a bit and get some shut-eye for the night.

Nighty nite; sleep tight.

Ever wonder how you can sleep tight? Well, in pioneer days the beds were made of logs with ropes laced in and out. After a while the ropes would stretch and get loose causing back problems so to be comfortable you had to tighten the ropes so the bed would not sag. This UBI (useless bit of information) comes from the collection of Stepdad. Just ask and I can regale you with hundreds of them.

YAWN ... Slept pretty good last night. My cats were good little ones and let me sleep until my usual getting up time of 7:00AM. So the usual routine is to get disconnected from the feeding pump and flush the tubes. Then the cats get fed. Next step is to change the dressing at the feeding tube site. I removed the sponge and detected that the tube was still leaking but not as bad. My plan of attack on the situation is to let things settle down for a couple of days to see if it will fix itself. I don't hold much hope of that happening so I will be contacting the surgeon's office. His assistant suggested a possible solution would be to remove the Mic-Key overnight to allow the opening to shrink. Then we put the tube back in where it should be tighter. That we will have to see.