Monday November 27, 2023
I put off getting our stuff together until the morning of, yet again… Bad habits die hard? But I got everything together. I only ended up forgetting his empty gel capsules I used to put his pressed pills into since they tend to get stuck and make him gag. So we loaded up, put numbing cream on his “cubital fossa”… you know, his elbow pit, and on his port and then we headed to the clinic.
We got to the clinic about 10:30. He needed a chest x-ray, so we went down for that. came back up stairs, got his vitals, drew blood for labwork and went to wait. While we waited, we talked about the plan for putting the tube back in and started some fluids.
His x-ray came back and looked Great!! He had sooooo much less fluid around his lungs and everything. The labs came back good as well. Everything looked good and he was finally clear to start up the Chemo again. I think we are like 3 and a half weeks behind schedule at this point?
Later in the day, early afternoon, they got us moved into a room. Brandon was already getting super worked up about putting the feeding tube back in. Given how bad the experience was last week, I asked them to give him something stronger to help him relax while they got it in. Last week they had given him Versed. This time they decided to go with a higher dose of Ativan. At first it made him very relaxed, tired and a bit loopy.
But just like with the versed, when it was game time, he snapped out of lala land and snapped into losing his mind. He was trying his best, but his mind would not register or stick with what everyone was saying, It was a pretty traumatic experience for me, and it wasn’t even being done to me. After several attempts and changing the type of feeding tube, they finally saw success. Brandon was understandably unhappy. Everyone was doing the best they could, but it was still very hard on him.
Once it was in. Brandon stayed upset for a while. He eventually fell asleep. He would occassionally wake up and say gibberish and then fall back asleep. After a bit, I decided to go get the rest of our stuff from the car. By the time I got back, he had woken up had to pee, and freaked out a little because I wasn’t there and he didn’t know where I was.
I got him calmed down and after a bit of getting settled, he wanted a sandwich. So I went downstairs and got him a sandwich. I was shocked, but he actually ate the entire sandwich. He watched some YouTube on his phone for a bit. It wasn’t too long before he was out again.
Feeding through the tube started up around 10:00 PM and Chemo started up about 11:00 PM. The rest of the night was quick except for the occasional waking up to pee from the fluids.
I tried to make some progress on updates for the website and for the merch store, but there is still a lot to do.