27th Anniversary in ER

Well, ok, I'll tell you the story, but just promise that you won't try this for a good time! Karri, as she has noted below, has been feeling pretty good. (She is also pretty plucky - in a good week, she sees doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel no more than five times between blood work, IV needle change, getting her fluid drained, checking in with her oncology practice etc. Does this sound fun to you?)

At any rate, this was a busy week - she had a needle change and blood work on Monday, and on Tuesday she met with her Nurse Practioner, Lina, at Dr. Sherman's office and she also had fluid drained (another 7 liters!). Kudos to Claude who is most often the volunteer driver to and from her appointments. [As she gets closer and closer to another chemo treatment, it seems as if the fluid build up increases again - each chemo treatment 'kicks it' for a bit but so far only temporarily.]

On Tuesday night she had to drink "gunk" for a CT scan, which she had on Wednesday. She had been feeling a bit of hip/lower back pain for about 24 hours, and then on Wednesday evening, about 10pm, it began to intensify. By 11pm, it was the worst sort of back pain she could ever remember experiencing, and so once again, she and Jerry were off to the ER to see what the heck was going on. While they were grateful that it has been a couple of months since a late night trip to ER that didn't really help with the pain, the worry, or the fact that as midnight came on, they realized it was their 27th anniversary - ouch! Eventually the ER staff accessed her CT scan from earlier in the day and said whatever it was didn't look tumor-related (a relief!); they took X-rays and said it wasn't bone related. For REAL relief, they shot Karri up in her hip and lower back with her favorite IV pain killer (Dilaudid) and she began to feel splendid. At it wore down to 4AM (when they finally went home), Jerry probably wished they'd given him some also. Today (Thursday) she has been pretty miserable once the IV pain killers wore off. The pill substitutes don't work nearly as well, as you can imagine. After deciding that it didn't seem to matter what position she was in or what she was doing, she decided to join Myrth, Allie, Jenna and others to see "Sisterhood of the Traveling Paints 2," figuring it couldn't make things worse. When I (Kim) talked with her not long ago, Myrth had helped her shower, dug out Grandma Harriet's wheelchair to transport her (her back is so locked up that she can't easily move), and they were off. Characteristically, Myrth was doing everything humanly possible to make life easier for Karri, and Karri was being pragmatic through the pain and discomfort. "I'll take my pain meds round the clock and it will get better," she told me. Her Nurse Practioner speculates that it is a major muscle strain, possibly made worse by the fact that long needles are used in that part of the body for the abdominal taps she has regularly and by the procedure of the CT scan she had on Wednesday -- all of which can tend to aggravate her already sensitive spinal and abdominal regions. Now we are hoping that she is right that the meds will help, and we hope that will happen quickly and she can go back off them soon as they will be tough on her already fragile gastro system, aggravating her gastritis.

If things DO calm down, we're already scheduled to see Dr. Sherman for a meeting to hear more about the CT scan results on Monday afternoon, so we'll let you know what comes of that. And we are all keeping our fingers crossed that things DO calm down and she doesn't need any more visits to ER or anywhere else in hospital except medical imaging where she goes regularly every 5 days or so for her fluid drainage. Thanks, as ever, for your wonderful support. Love Team Karri