Hospital Happiness

So, Karen's been feeling really junky for almost two weeks now. On Monday (the 14th) we went to the emergency room because she was feeling so bad she couldn't breathe and had a lot of chest pain. At the hospital, they couldn't find any causes for the pain--they looked for blood clots and fluid around the heart and didn't see anything. So the doctor prescribed some pain medication (hydrocodone) to help with the pain and sent us home.

The next day Karen called her oncologist in Texas and she prescribed an antibiotic since Karen had a cough, so we went to the pharmacy Tuesday night to pick up those two prescriptions and Karen started taking them. There is good news, though. When talking to her oncologist she found out that the cancer treatment is working well and that her cancer has been reducing! Well, the next night (Wednesday) she was feeling worse. Tuesday night she had a really rough time sleeping--her heart rate was really high and she just couldn't get comfortable. So we went back to the emergency room. This time, after a lot of more tests and almost getting sent home with no extra information, the doctor looked closer at her EKG and decided that she had pericarditis. We also realized that she was allergic to the antibiotic that her oncologist had prescribed, which is why she had such a hard time Tuesday and Wednesday night.

On Friday she had an appointment to see a cardiologist. He examined her and said that she had all of the signs of viral pericarditis, for which the best treatment is just to take ibuprofen and wait for the viral infection to die down. But her condition kept getting worse and worse--she was unable to go to school because she had no energy to move around. Her mom and I were concerned about her going to Texas on Thursday (the 24th) by herself, since she would not be able to walk all over an airport. Originally we had bought our tickets so that Karen could come down to Texas on Thursday morning and I would join her Friday evening, after school. So, luckily Karen's mom was able to come out to fly down with her and push her around in a wheelchair and carry her luggage for her and everything.

That's when all of the excitement began. When she got here to MD Anderson, the doctors said that they couldn't start the cancer treatment until her heart was more stable. They took more scans of her chest and saw that she did have fluid around her heart, so they took her into surgery and installed a window to drain the fluid from her chest. So she's been recovering since then. She was doing fine all this morning--she was feeling good enough to walk down to the X-Ray center to have her X-Ray and she walked around the hospital a little bit. Her breathing was fine and she was even good enough to come off the oxygen for a while. So we were waiting forever for her doctor to come and give her a pass to go take her Praxis exam that she needs to get her teaching license to get hired again next year. Unfortunately, her test was scheduled at 2:15 and her doctor didn't come until 3:30. But he wasn't a very good doctor either. He prescribed that Karen be given 125mL/hr of saline, an increase of what she had been having. Of course, there really wasn't any need we could see of her being on saline at all, since she wasn't showing any signs of being dehydrated. The best thing we could think of is that the doctor thought her blood pressure too low (since she's historically 80/50-ish) and so he thought she should have saline to keep her blood pressure up. Anyway, an hour or two after they upped the dose on the saline she started coughing and having breathing problems. Her heart rate, which had been down in the low 80s, came back up to high 90s and even into the 100s. Her EKG also started showing irregular patterns in her heart waves. So we figured all of these symptoms must have been caused from the extra saline that was being pumped into her. So we asked the nurse to turn it down and she turned it down to 21 mL/hr and she started feeling better after a few hours. Her heart rate has returned to about 82 and stabilized, but she is still having trouble breathing and she wheezes. So we really don't like the doctor for that reason, aside from the fact that he took all day to come in to see her.

But she's feeling much better now, so we're all happy and glad about that. Of course, the mean doctor won't letter her start her cancer treatment until Monday, which means that she might not be able to go home until Friday, so she'll have to miss almost two whole weeks of teaching. She is handling all of this very well. We're still not sure what she's going to do about her Praxis exam or about missing all of next week, but she's ever-optimistic. I'm sure if I were in her shoes I wouldn't be handling it as well as she.

We thank you all for all your continued prayers and support.