You can probably tell from the heading, today was a good day although a long one. The test was at 9:30 this morning in Portland and we met with her surgeon a couple times from about 1:45 to after 2:30 in the afternoon. Bottom line from all this is that the test showed no signs of leakage anymore and she can now start the transition period to eating "normally"! While at the surgeon's office, they also had her drink some Cranberry juice to see if anything from that came out the drain. After drinking about 4 ounces, Barbara said she was full and could not drink any more. This shows how little she can eat now. Nothing came out of the drain tube, so the surgeon had one of the nurses remove the drain tube so Barbara is down to only the feeding tube now. This was all great and we are now clearly going down the road to getting on to the next step.
Starting immediately, she can start drinking and slowly eating. The surgeon wants her to start slow and mostly drink liquids and have some liquid soups and things like pudding, yogurt (without fruit pieces in it) and other things like that. She will do that for two days and then we contact her and let her know how she is doing. She will continue with the feeding tube for now since she will not be getting much nutrition by mouth until she is able to eat a lot more in total calories and in more solid food. How long this will take is very much different for each person, so not sure how long this transition period will last. Could be a couple weeks or much longer. We will just have to see.
Barbara very much wants to start doing as much as possible, but it is obvious it will take some time. She had the 4 ounces at the doctor's office that filled her up. On the way home, we went to a diner and since milk shakes were on the list of things she could try, she got one for her "dinner". She drank a little and initially enjoyed it, but it upset her "stomach" afterward, probably because it was too sweet. She tried a little bit of my mashed potatoes (mostly the gravy) and really enjoyed that also, but she ate very little. Not sure if that was part of the upset stomach also.
We went to the store and got several puddings and yogurts for her to try as well as power type drinks (high in protein) and we will see how that goes over the next couple days. She will be eating very small helpings whenever she wants and we will be figuring out what is ok and what causes problems. Besides emails with the surgeon, we go back to see her in two weeks for another follow up. We will also probably go back to an Oncologist (either same one or a new one) sometime in the next couple weeks. The surgeon said she would get us in with the other Oncologist she knows in Farmington, so we hope that happens.
Barbara is very happy to be able to start eating again and be down to one tube, so today was a very good day. She still has a long way to go to get back to the new normal, not counting any additional Chemo, but at least the past few weeks of just waiting is finally over as well as the worry that she may need something to fix the leak.
I may have left out some details, but as I remember more and we make additional progress, I will do new updates. Thanks again for everyone's thoughts and prayers.
Wayne
No comments:
Post a Comment