Cycle 4, day 19- Tube Free!

Well, the past few days have been interesting.  As mentioned previously, her feeding tube came loose last week and we had to go in to have it restitched to her.  At about the same time, she starting having sharp pains in the same area once in a while.  It was not bad the first few days, so she did not say much about it.  However, it continued to get worse and yesterday she was in extreme pain any time she moved.  As long as she stayed still, there was very little or no pain most of the time.  As it continued to get worse, I ended up contacting her surgeon yesterday via email and she indicated that we should either go to the ER if it was too bad or come into the office today to have the tube removed if she could hold out.  The surgeon is not in the Portland office on Monday's, but she has several people who could handle removing the tube and making sure there was no other problems.  We got to Portland around noon and as soon as the tube was removed, Barbara felt immediate relief.  She is still a little sore and feeling some discomfort, but nothing like she was.  They indicated that it would take about a week for the "holes" in her intestines and side to completely seal, but unless there is any major fluids coming out, she should be able to eat and drink without any problems.  She held off eating for about 5 hours to help let is seal some (their recommendation, but absolutely required), but she was able to eat dinner without any problems.  Bottom line is that she has now had all her tubes removed and we can now concentrate on learning how to eat, especially once the below issue is resolved.

There still is one more issue to be resolved.  We also mentioned to the doctor that food seems to get stuck in her throat fairly often.  The doctor indicated that this needs to be looked at and she is making arrangements to have and EGD done (a type of Endoscopy).  This will require Barbara to be put under again, but it is a pretty straight forward procedure and similar to several she has already had.  Hopefully they will be able to discover and possibly correct at the same time whatever is causing the problem.  Having some scar tissue seems to be fairly common and hopefully nothing new will be discovered or any new surgery needed.  If there is nothing that can be done, she is able to eat this way, she just has to be very careful.  It is also possible that it will just take some time for things to stretch out a little on its own and everything will be fine given time.  We will just have to wait and see what comes out of the testing.  Nothing has been scheduled yet, but once we have some results, I will let everyone know.

As a side note, we have not been using the feeding tube for several days now and during that period she was able to keep her weight about the same, so she has been able to eat enough each day.  Because of the pain, she was not doing much, so her caloric needs would have been lower than normal, but at least she was able to take in close to enough food every day on average.  It is hard to accurately measure how much she is getting since she takes such small meals and more than just three a day, but we thought she was doing pretty good and the weight measurement seems to confirm that.  This will continued to be something we need to keep on top of for some time until this all becomes second nature, but we will get there.

As far as the side effects from the last Chemo, she is still having a little nausea and her mouth is a little sore, but she is getting very close to being through all that.  She does still get tired easily, but she is able to do more each day.  She is clearly well on the way to getting better so we can get back to "normal" and just do the periodic follow up checks hoping the Chemo and surgery were as successful as we think.  This is, of course, assuming the EGD does not uncover something unexpected or difficult to correct.

Wayne