9/20: The Plastic Surgeon and the Catheter
Today we took Leo to see Dr. Schechter, a plastic surgeon, since he has experience with wounds. Of course Leo wasn't terribly happy to have yet another stranger in a white coat touching him under a big bright light. The good news is that Leo's wound doesn't seem to be infected -- this is very important since we must minimize the downtime from antineoplastons, especially for stuff like antibiotics. The not so good news is that it isn't healing very fast at all, which is probably due to the combination of decadron, which seems to have screwed-up everything, and the general state of treating a tumor.
The tumor treatment, we didn't immediately realize, is trying to stop quickly-growing cells, but that's exactly what the wound needs to close! So he asked if there's any way Leo can be off of treatment for a few weeks, since that's how long he said it should take to heal, but obviously that's not an option. Treating the tumor comes first. In the mean time, we'll continue to have daily dressing changes and make sure nothing gets infected. Speaking of dressing changes, he did suggest to switch from iodoform to Aquacel, which is what our home health nurse had been recommending all along. So even though this wasn't an exciting visit and I finally did see the wound, which wasn't as bad as I had expected, at least we didn't get bad bad news. That came after the visit.
For the first time Leo's (new) catheter did not return blood. This is bad news because we were told it should always return blood, since it goes directly into a vein. That means if there's something wrong, the only option is surgery (to remove it and get a new one, in a new spot on Leo's body). That also means there was no blood test today, which is another bad thing. But we did get an order of TPA again after Houston said to just do the test tomorrow morning. G-d willing this'll work.
The combination of hardly sleeping last night and the surgeon and the home nurse put Leo in one heck of a bad mood today. But he finally took a much-needed nap in the evening and just fell back asleep after yet another drinking binge. I should do the same...
The tumor treatment, we didn't immediately realize, is trying to stop quickly-growing cells, but that's exactly what the wound needs to close! So he asked if there's any way Leo can be off of treatment for a few weeks, since that's how long he said it should take to heal, but obviously that's not an option. Treating the tumor comes first. In the mean time, we'll continue to have daily dressing changes and make sure nothing gets infected. Speaking of dressing changes, he did suggest to switch from iodoform to Aquacel, which is what our home health nurse had been recommending all along. So even though this wasn't an exciting visit and I finally did see the wound, which wasn't as bad as I had expected, at least we didn't get bad bad news. That came after the visit.
For the first time Leo's (new) catheter did not return blood. This is bad news because we were told it should always return blood, since it goes directly into a vein. That means if there's something wrong, the only option is surgery (to remove it and get a new one, in a new spot on Leo's body). That also means there was no blood test today, which is another bad thing. But we did get an order of TPA again after Houston said to just do the test tomorrow morning. G-d willing this'll work.
The combination of hardly sleeping last night and the surgeon and the home nurse put Leo in one heck of a bad mood today. But he finally took a much-needed nap in the evening and just fell back asleep after yet another drinking binge. I should do the same...
posted by Yury at 12:11 AM
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