And we're back

Sorry, dear reader, for the hiatus but time just flies by. Geri came home on Saturday afternoon. They gave her two units of blood during the night Friday and the surgeon came and did more cleaning and dressing on the port wound on Saturday before she left. When we got home a home-care nurse showed up with IV supplies and instructed yours truly on how to administer same. Geri is getting two antibiotics, one on a six hour cycle and the other on a 12 hour cycle. The six-hour one is for about 30 mins and the 12-hour one is about two hours. We have worked the cycle so we do the two at 6am and 6pm and the single one at noon and midnight. Geri also has to have shots twice a day so we do these on the twelves also. The whole process is so time consuming and very frustrating as Geri was looking forward to the time during radiation as being free of needles and tubes for a few weeks.

We spent a lot of time on Sunday trying to locate the home-care nurse the hospital had allegedly arranged to do the wound cleaning and dressing. This was a different company from the IV company because of some demarcation issue between pharmaceutical and nursing and, in he rush to leave Sat afternoon, we had not got any contact info. We eventually got a call back at 2:30 pm from a 3rd party organization in Florida that the hospital use to make the arrangements for home-care. They had contacted 14 companies without success but still had seven more on their list to call. Finally they find someone and Angela shows up at 5:30pm with very little idea why she is there. We have to go through the whole story for the zillion th time and tell her what needs to be done. Of course she has different ideas on how the wound should be packed from those of the surgeon ("those surgeon only know how to open you up they don't know how to handle the healing part"). Also, would you believe, she shows me how to do it because their job is to train the home care-giver and to back out ASAP. We said, "Wait a cotton-pickin' minute here, missy. We were told someone would come daily to take care of this wound issue." It turns out the company had been instructed to provide seven days of attention. Lord protect us from opinionated little people.

The wound care took until 7:00 pm so we were delayed in starting the IV, which we could not start the midnight one a little early as we had planned. Geri stayed in bed all day as she still has little energy. We hope the blood she had on Sat. morning will kick in over the next couple of days.

Monday, up at 5:45am to prepare and administer the antibiotic drips. We start the noon (30-mimute) one early so we can leave by 12:15pm to go to the clinic at Crawford Long for our1:00pm appointment with the radiation Dr. He reviews the information and discusses the process. Geri goes for a CAT scan at Emory this Thursday to define the target for the radiation treatment. From these scans they work out positions, angles orientations, etc to make sure they blast the tumor. We go back to the clinic a week on Thursday for equipment alignment and set-up ready for the treatment. This will be for 20 mins. a day, five days a week for five to six weeks.

We scheduled our appointments and rushed home to be there for the home-care nurse to take care of the wound. This was a different one from the previous day and he had called at 11:40am to say he was on his way. We said we were leaving soon and that we had told Angela on Sunday we would not be back until 3:00pm. She had not passed the this on to him and he had planned to take the afternoon off so he was not happy, not with us but with Angela. Anyway, he was there at 2:45pm when we got home from the hospital and he was very nice. He did the wound packing more like the surgeon had and Geri thought he did a better job.

We had just got the 6:00 drip started when Debbie & Kristine arrived with a delicious Hungarian/Italian dish for supper. Then Yonnie arrived with more dishes of food to put in the freezer for later in the week. We are dining in style and appreciate it very much.

I keep prompting Geri to write her blog but she is still feeling weak and in pain from both the port wound and the tumor. Doing anything tires her very quickly. She hopes to be back blogging in a day or two when the wound starts healing. In the mean time I will try to keep you all informed. Its midnight, time for another IV and shot.