Rewind, a quick review of the past few days at the hospital | yosoyrosa's Blog

I had been by his side when the emergency room staff did the sonogram.  She seemed to take forever, chatting occasionally, asking why he'd not had the gall bladder removed yet since there was a presence of gallstones.  I watched her hone in on the left kidney taking picture after picture while my husband covered his eyes with his arm since his head was in such pain.  When she finished up, she wheeled out the hospital bed to the Xray, the hospital wasn't taking any chances on missing anything.

An hour had gone by, then two so I stepped out to get a sweater and my computer from the truck, gone maybe 7-8 minutes after hours of sitting at my husband's side.  When I walked back in the hospital emergency room my hubby was in, I could see right away that there was a major problem.  The emergency doctor was on his left, the ER nurse on the right, and my hubby said they had told him while I was out that they found another possible tumor on his left kidney.  Oh, yeah, and he had pancreatitis, this whas what was causing the pain.

We were devastated, and when they left I admitted out loud that this one scared me, he agreed.  However, when common sense came around I reminded both of us that a sonogram is a preliminary diagnostic tool and that she had said that visibilility of the pancreas had been impaired due to belly gas.  These are sound waves that leave 'black holes' in the picture if for any reason there is no bounce-back response, such as a bubble of gas.  

Within the hour, the ER nurse brought me the images CD that I asked for, and here we were in the emergency room with a laptop looking at pictures taken just hours earlier, including where the technician had clearly marked 3 pictures with a black spot where the kidney had been identified.  The area she had marked was pretty large, nearly as large as one of his larger liver lesions, and a growth of that size within 6 weeks of the last CT seemed highly unlikely.   Moving on to the next set, we saw the chest xrays, including where the buckle and zipper were showing and laughed.  We both took joy in seeing this solid white mass in the lower right ribcage, mid right-lobe liver where the TACE procedure had taken place 3 weeks ago.  It looked a lot like the example from the website that the unversity hepatologist had shown us of a 'successful' termination of a tumor.  Hope was alive again.

After getting moved to the Med Surg floor, the next day was a tough one with the dinner drip with morphine making him really nauseous. Not taking the powerful painkillers meant severe discomfort and elevated blood pressure.  At noon, there was an order for a follow-up CT scan, but by the time I'd gotten there at 4:00 after work, he had just started taking the contrast.  That was especially tough, as each drink further aggravated the pancreas, and totally contradicted the orders of 'no food, no drink, nothing orally, nada', he was totally miserable.   At 7:00pm they came with the wheelchair to bring him to the scan, me and his cousin trailing behind. 

Finally, at 8:00 the hospital speaker system was announcing the end of visiting hours, so I started packing up and asking for the films.  After being pointed in a few different directions, I set off alone on my way to radiology.  Politely but firmly I asked for the films for patient hubby, with any results if they'd had them from the read yet.  Since the tech remembered our case, he smiled and said to wait just a moment, he'd not had a chance to prepare them yet, but within minutes I had the answers.  In cryptic scribble I could see the measured notes of liver lesions, gallstones, and nothing, absolutely nothing about the kidney or anything on the left side.

Back in the hospital room, there was no leaving until I gave him what I could make out.  No kidney I announced, he didn't call out anything on the kidney!  However, we still needed to wait for the final report, this was, after all, a preliminary read after hours.  Anxious, I put in the CD and flipped through to the kidney slices of the CT, there was no gaping hole like what the sonogram indicated.  Both kidneys were nearly identical flip versions of each other, I knew I couldn't find anything, but needed to get these pictures to the experts in the university.

And so the report reads: Both kidneys are normal in size and configuration showing no evidence of solid or cystic mass... A single large 3.2x 3.0x 3.0 cm course calcification has developed in the interval at the central right love of the liver of undetermined etiology.  Ha! He see's our TACE and the kidneys are confirmed clear!

So here we are this evening, and he's snoozing fairly comfortabely again, snoring.  I hear the background noise of the two TV in the room broadcasting election results, the hum of the drip pump, and the regular air pressure pump of the circulation pads they wrapped around his legs to keep the blood flowing.  The lights are off and its dark at 7:00pm, there's no comfortable easy chair to relax in.   We've moved from morphine to demoral, and all medications are changed to be through IV.  The doctor has agreed that if there are any complications whatsoever, transport to university is the plan unless he's not stable for the move.  The liquids have been doubled in an effort to flush the pancreas as quickly as possible, yet at this point it looks like he'll be here for a while.