I'm starting to feel like King Candy/Turbo at the end of Wreck-It's-Ralph

I keep getting drawn in closer and closer to an inevitable outcome no matter how much I want to avoid it. Like bugs in a bug zapper.

I made it exactly one week on my soft solids diet.... We went back in on the 15th for the same problems. I couldn't keep anything down. We actually knew we would be back in the hospital sooner than that. On Friday we went into Lemmen Holton Cancer Pavilion and I got a bunch of fluids. I was trying to hold out until Monday because I already had an appointment up there, and they would have been able to admit me without going through ER. I couldn't make it! We went in on Sunday afternoon.

I got another tube down the nose. That was an adventure all its own. They had to put it in not once, but twice! The tube was twisted up a little too tight, and it didn't want go all the way down. Second time's a charm. My goodness, that is a painful experience! Especially when you do it twice back to back... So now where admitted to floor 7 instead of 5 (surgical instead of oncology) so I knew they had something in mind right of the bat. I had a bunch more scans (Big surprise, right?) I lost count quite some time back but we're talking about at least 20 CT scans in the past two years. Again, I was NPO (nothing by mouth, just the sponge to wet down my lips and gums. This time it took it seriously (for now).

Eventually Dr Chung came in and said what he had said a week earlier, it blocked up at the same spot, and that couldn't fix it. It was either going to have to open up on its own again or I was going home with hospice. I told him I just wanted to get through the holidays. And that I couldn't let Christmas, in my kids minds, to be associated with their dad dying.

Hospitals are huge entities. Sometimes left hand doesn't know the the right hand is doing... Angela and I were sitting in my room while a nurse was entering my vitals into the computer when someone from transport showed up. Angela asked if they were sure they had the right room. They did. We were hesitant to go because nobody had said anything about having a procedure (7th floor, remember?). Thankfully the nurse was still in the room, and she was able to look it up. They were taking me down to radiology. They wheeled me down and put me in a waiting room. It was over a half an hour before someone came and explained why I was there. It seems that they could see some fluid on my right lung. It just needed to be drawn off by putting a large needle between two ribs into this pocket of fluid, and just let it siphon off. Eventually they wheeled me down to the interventional radiology room (so they could guide the needle) and we got the ball rolling. They were able to use ultrasound (yay, for less exposure) and that they though it was about 400ml of fluid.

Because of all my ileostomy measuring I've done, I know what 400ml looks like. Thought that that was an awfully large number. I was wrong. 1550ml is an awfully large number! That's how much fluid that drew from the sac that my right lung sits in. 1 and a 1/2 liters. Almost a half gallon! My right lung was being scrunched up so much, no one could believe that I didn't notice this. Having a high tolerance for pain can be a really bad thing... That's what got me into this mess in the first place. While all this was going on, Dr Chung was working on a plan, too.

He suggested I get a stomach drain put in. He said that's what he would recommend fro his brother if he was in the same boat as I was in. The nicest part of getting the drain, is that I wouldn't have to have a tube down my nose anymore. I agreed to it and the procedure was pretty straightforward. They put you just slightly "under" during this procedure, and I really do not remember any of it, but when I came to I didn't have a tube in my nose any more.

The other big difference between this trip in and the one a week earlier is that they set me up with TPN (feeding through the blood stream). This gave me a great deal more energy and made it a lot easier to cope with shape of things. Like I said at the beginning, I'm like a moth being drawn into the zapper. Truth be told, things are pretty bleak at the moment. I'm getting fed from a big bag with a pump putting "food" into my jugular. That's what's keeping me alive.

I'm home now. I came home on Saturday the 21st. Everything else is the same still doing the feeding bag, but only for 12 hours at a time, so I can put it on at 8pm and take it off at 8am. Then I'm free the rest of the day. The stomach drain allows me to drink "thin liquids" whatever those are. The ability to drink is psychological only, I do not get at nutrition or hydration through it. Just the satisfaction of being able to drink something is nice. I'm the first 24 hours I was home, I think I drank 8 water bottles.

Hopefully the rest of the holiday season will pass by uneventfully.