Tuesday, November 28, 2017

Update on Kay's Situation

Thanksgiving 2017 will be one to remember, or maybe better to forget if we can. Our place is in major renovation mode, and we were blessed to stay at the Asplund’s home while they visited family in Portland.  On the day before Thanksgiving, after a really enjoyable day visiting with Stephanie Allgood and doing art projects, on getting home Kay started to feel really poorly.  By early Thursday morning she started with diarrhea and then a strange vomiting without nausea.   This was severe enough that our move to the Asplund’s was put off until early afternoon.  Her gastrointestinal troubles continued all day, and Brett and I had a very quiet Thanksgiving meal while Kay struggled on the couch. 
By mid-evening Kay was getting very weak, and we went to the ER for IV hydration and evaluation. Her labs looked OK, she managed not to vomit there, and we got home by about 1 AM.  We slept in Friday, but all weekend Kay couldn’t eat anything without severe pain, and by Monday morning we contacted Dr. McCroskey and he saw Kay yesterday.  He ordered an abdominal CT scan that explained the problem, showing a distal partial small bowel obstruction.  (near the end of the small bowel before it dumps into the large bowel was a place where the bowel narrows considerably causing the bowel above there to dilate and fill up with air and fluid.)  This explains the pain with eating, the vomiting, and the severe bloating Kay has.  It is not clear what is causing the partial obstruction, but it is a fairly common problem in people who have had abdominal surgeries.  It may be related to adhesions, or possibly kinking where cancer causes a loop of bowel to bend too sharply.  It is not considered a surgical emergency at this time.  The plan is for Kay rest in the hospital, not eat or drink, get IV hydration and use a naso-gastric tube to drain her stomach and decompress the small bowel above the point of obstruction.   This may or may not work, but often it does once the proximal swelling of the bowel loops goes down.
This is likely to take a few days though and though we have been trying to find reasons to get out of the condo-under-construction, this was not high on our list of ways to get away.
The other not-good issue found on the CT scan is that the fairly small metastasis of the cancer to Kay’s liver and the area behind her peritoneal cavity have grown quite a bit in the last 2 months, despite being on the weekly Taxol chemotherapy.  This is an issue we will need to address after the bowel obstruction resolves and Kay is well enough to resume her chemotherapy.

Kay is at Good Samaritan Hospital in Puyallup, and maybe in a day or so a brief visit once or twice a day will be nice, but at least today we need to just get settled in and appreciate everyone’s prayers and best wishes.