Lung Caper

I try to get a little more sleep on the weekends since the doctors don’t come in at the crack of dawn, Mike doesn’t have radiation, and I don’t have to fight the traffic going through Malfunction Junction. I guess since I came in a little later yesterday, Mike was going to make sure I stayed later as well. He ended up getting his chemotherapy late. He’s supposed to get it between 4:00 and 5:00, but he didn’t get it until 5:40. (At 5:00 I called the front desk to remind them he needs it by 5:15.) As I’ve mentioned before, this creates a problem with dinner because Mike can’t eat for two hours afterwards and the cafeteria closes at 7:00. Sure, there’s a microwave on the floor, but who wants reheated hospital food??? So I had the brilliant idea to get him some Lizard’s Thicket. After dinner Mike was coughing pretty badly and breathing hard. When the nurse came in to check him, she heard something a little odd in his lower right lung. Because he seemed to be breathing so hard, she went ahead and hooked him up to the oxygen. This seemed to help his breathing, but they went ahead and did an x-ray on his chest. There was some concern that perhaps he had swallowed something wrong and it had gotten into his lungs, which could cause pneumonia. To protect the innocent, I won’t mention the name of the person who fed Mike dinner since she was feeding him so that I could go downstairs and spend a little time with Ava. But in case it’s getting the best of you, her name rhymes with flair. My brilliant idea was beginning to not seem so brilliant at that point. I mean Lizard’s Thicket is good and all, but it’s not literally to die for. Luckily, the x-ray came back fine and showed nothing in his lungs. Whew! "Flair" and I ended up staying at the hospital until 12:30 last night waiting on the results and making sure everything was okay.

I did talk with the on-call doctor today about the CT scan. Not including the swelling, the tumor is pretty much the same as it was last weekend. She said that a CT scan is just a two-dimensional reading and isn’t necessarily accurate to the millimeter. Transverse dimension means from left to right, and AP dimension means from front to back. She also said that how we physically see Mike doing is a better indicator of his status than the scans.

Other than that, Mike’s pretty much been the same today. If he’s awake, he’ll sit up and talk with you. Just don’t anticipate any factual information from him. This evening he said we have been married a hundred years. Surely nearly seven years with me doesn’t feel like one hundred!