Happy Holidays!!
2012-Dec-30

It would appear that this blogger has taken a serious holiday. Sorry for the silence and I certainly didn't mean to leave off with me still in hospital!! No wonder I keep hearing rumours that I am "in hospital".

So the rest of the story is I was discharged from hospital on November 16th. Basically the days have been up and down. Fairly quickly I was able to eat more solid food. Food has never been so good:)  In order to do more chemo a scan needed to show marked improvement over the previous scan. A satisfactory CT scan was done Nov. 28th that showed the appendicitis had "calmed down" although the appendix was still not normal. To be sure antibiotics were continued for a couple more weeks. The second round of chemo was done Nov. 30. It appeared to be an easy round but a couple days after I had a sudden, severe pain flare. These happen occasionally and may or may not be related to the chemo.

Another round of chemo was completed Dec. 19 and was also uneventful at the time. However, by the weekend (Dec. 22nd) pain had increased drastically. Fortunately, I have been placed on the palliative home care list so was able to survive the weekend and then a nurse came by on Monday and she was able to get orders through the on-call palliative care doctor to double my pain medications. Seriously, my long-acting narcotics were doubled which means I was previously crazily under-dosed. I have done reasonably well since, but still have moments a couple times a day where my pain is not well-managed. I'm sure we'll address this next visit.

About the palliative home care team.... it is a team of nurses and docs who are available 24/7. They are extremely good at what they do, readily available and they do house calls:) I am really happy about being on their list in spite of the "palliative" implications.

We sure appreciate every thought and visit and card and phone call and prayer. Thanks again for all your on going support. Thanks to any who have posted replies to my blog. I thought all replies were going to my email only but some stay on the blog website. I only just figured out how to read all the relplys. Thanks to each one. For anyone wanting to reply to the blog rest assured that nothing will be posted unless I got permission first...