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.
