Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Never a Dull Moment

I've been looking forward to having things slow down, but things have instead gone haywire. My husband started having problems during his nightly dialysis treatments last Thursday night. On Friday night, we spent from 2:00 - 3:00 am trying to figure out what to do and ended up calling the nurse, who told him to stop his treatment, not do anything over the weekend, and come in on Monday morning. It has now been determined that the catheter has migrated up under his rib cage, thus causing pain when he tried to drain the dialysis solution from his abdomen. For now, he is enduring what is called manual exchanges (done without a machine) twice a day. It takes 45 painful minutes to drain the solution after it has done its thing over several hours, but with the threat of hemodialysis hanging over our heads, we are willing to endure almost anything. We have an appointment with the surgeon on Monday and will go from there, but surgery is inevitable. We both hope this will be considered "urgent" so that Phil doesn't have to suffer too long. It is good that he doesn't need a lot of dialysis, so that two exchanges a day are sufficient.

This is probably very confusing unless you have some knowledge of dialysis; the bottom line is that he is in pain, and his catheter needs to be moved back to the correct position.

With all this going on, I haven't had a lot of time to work on crafts, although I did make a purse. I used the newest pattern from Lazy Girl Designs, the Miranda Day Bag. I made it using fabric from my stash. I was surprised at how big it is, but when I put everything in it, it didn't seem so big!

Thursday night we are going to the Ernie Haase and Signature Sound concert. We got tickets as part of a group from our church. It's going to be a crazy day, as Phil has his chemo at 2:30, then we'll have to race home so he can drain his dialysis solution, grab some dinner (hot dogs!), and drive to the concert. We have been looking forward to this since we learned about it last October! I am hoping that I won't be sneezing from the cold I came down with on Monday night; I've been sneezing up a storm today.

There's never a dull moment in our household!

1 comment:

Michelle said...

Ginny,
I hope pain relief is speedy and that Phil's catheter can be moved..no one should have to suffer. I hope your cold gets better too! That's great that you guys are going to a concert! Enjoy!!

Hugs,
Michelle