A Few Rough Days

Thursday night Kay unfortunately managed to pull out her feeding tube, resulting in another call to the HomeHelp. So it was very late before Marion got to bed - I was already knocked out from the previous few days. Marion decided to sleep on a camp bed in Kay's room since Kay was very restless from the day and claimed that she couldn't sleep. The result was that Marion had a bad night, made worse by the feed pump which kept throwing off alarms. Friday morning Marion looked like she had been run over by a tractor.

However, life goes on. I went to work and Marion plodded on through the day. My intention was to come home from work early, but you know how it is, there's always one more thing that needs to be done... So I got home around the normal time.

Around 6pm Kay started complaining of pain in her tummy. The chemo that she gets causes constipation, so she'd already been getting a laxative. But we decided to give her a double dose on Friday evening to help ease her system. Unfortunately it didn't seem to help. Kay was in pain all evening and into the night. We tried everything we could think of, paracetamol, hot water bottle, frequent trips to the loo. We moved her into our bedroom so that we could keep an eye on her, but this had the effect that neither of us got any sleep.

Around 1.30am I wanted confirmation that it really was constipation so I phoned the hospital. Nearly an hour later the doctor phoned me back and we went through the symptoms. The doctor concluded that is was constipation and that we should tough it out (haha, poor pun), but that if we felt it was getting worse we'd have to bring her in for an enema. Fortunately shortly after her system started to calm down and in the end we managed a few hours sleep. But today, we're again completely wiped out.

Marion went off to sort some things out this morning. I kept an eye on Kay while doing some admin. However Kay again started complaining of tummy pain, this time up near her ribs. I checked her a couple of times and felt that she was a little too warm. So I got the thermometer and took her temperature - it's one of those underarm things that peeps when it has reach a stable temperature. However the temperature just kept on rising. When it got to 38.2, as per instructions, I called the emergency room at the Catherina Hospital. They told us to bring Kay straight in and they'd run some blood tests. So Marion is now with Kay at the hospital and...

...Marion just called while I was writing this. Kay has an unidentified infection that means she will be admitted and given antibiotics immediately. The course will last for three days. All plans for treatment are now on hold, we'll hear more tomorrow. The good news is that her red cell count is good and her white cell count is down further, 0.5, which is also good. However some other component of her blood is way too low and indicates the presence of an infection. For now Marion & I have to work out how to rearrange our weekend accordingly. Who stays at the hospital and what do we need, etc, etc.

Fortunately Mum & my Aunt arrive tomorrow for a week so we will have some backup at home during the next days.

No need to invent a fire-and-brimstone-hell, this is worse.