a·plas·tic a·ne·mi·a/āˈplastik əˈnēmēə/

Noun: Deficiency of all types of blood cells caused by failure of bone marrow development

Saturday, July 30, 2011

Day 2 and 3

It's Ryan.  AGAIN. 

Andrya had her two most difficult days yesterday and today (Friday and Saturday; days 2 and 3).  She can't keep any food down and her nausea has been unbearable for her.  She has been getting severe motion sickness, which is making it all the worse.  Her headaches are still here too, though not as bad as before. 

She has also been extra feisty.  For the last two days she hasn't gotten out of bed much, hasn't eaten hardly anything and wouldn't talk much either.  Getting her to shower has also been a fight.  To her credit, she did shower both today and yesterday, but only on her terms, only when she was ready.  She still feels like her nurses and myself are condescending to her when we're trying to get her up and about.  I guess I can't blame her for being in a bad mood though.  She's just falling into a bit of a depression and once there, she won't listen to us and argues everything. 

Andrya and I also have been trying to work with her nurses on managing her pain and nausea medications.  I think I figured it out today.  She was diagnosed the night we had Kellan with a migraine.  She lost her peripheral vision for a few hours that night and it really scared us.  That was when her doctors made the migraine diagnosis. 

Now, I don't know much about migraines, but I know they can cause deep head pains but also nausea sometimes too.  The nurses thought that maybe her pain meds were causing her nausea, and two days ago they had switched her medication that she could manually operate as needed from nausea meds to pain meds since the other day she was having such problems with headaches.  But then the nausea was intolerable the last two days and the headaches were lingering.  They said also they wouldn't give her tylenol, as I wrote about a couple days ago, since they were worried it would cover up a fever caused by infection, which could be deadly for her right now.  All we wanted was for her discomfort from both symptoms to be gone.

They had done a C/T scan of her head yesterday morning and it came back normal, so they said that they didn't know why she was having headaches.  They assumed it was the chemo running its course and that the pain would go away but said it should have by now.  That was when I thought of the migraines and that seemed to "turn the light on" for the nurse.  So I was then able to get the nurse to give Andrya tylenol, which is what she wanted all along for her headaches, and they reworked all her nausea and pain meds to what we requested, all this after I spoke with the nurse practitioner and mentioned migraines...and now both have seemed to really subside!  I'm pretty proud of myself, if I may say so. 

By this evening (Saturday) she was feeling much better.  Her headaches (now being treated as migraines) are much more tolerable as is her nausea.  She ate soup and held it down, and she even just now asked for and ate the peanut butter cups (peanut buttah cuuups!) I bought her last night.  She also got up tonight, showered, and also walked some laps around the ward for the first time in 3 days. 

Now if we can just solve her latest side effect of the chemo and get her off the toilet, if you catch my drift...

1 comment:

  1. Bless you both. Ryan I am so proud of you for sticking near Andrya's side and being patient and helping to problem solve. To do that in a stressful situation is not always easy. Hey maybe that Navy training is paying off. Tell Andrya she's a rock star. She has made it this far. It's like the little engine that could. One day at a time to climb this mountain. Hopefully if you can get the meds figured out things will improve. I will be praying for that specifically. It's good to know exactly what we can be praying for. We love you both bunches. Tell her to think Happy thoughts of "Fried Cheesecake"

    ReplyDelete