You See the Most Interesting People. . .

. . . when you hang out in the ER in the middle of the night. I know, because that's where Greg and I spent last night. Kind of like a cross between a freak show and going to the WalMart SuperCenter at 2 a.m. However, to be fair, I probably wasn't looking my best at that point either.

When I got home from work, he was running a fever of 103+. This is becoming SOP. I called Barnes, and naturally, there was no room at the Inn. So, he's at St. John's in Springfield. But I called the nurse coordinator and she is starting the paperwork for a transfer. Dr. Vij is the attending on the transplant floor right now, so I told her to tell him to discharge someone so he can get in. She said she'd do her best. Loyal readers will recall that the last time we tried this hospital to hospital transfer thing, it only took a week(!). Lets hope for better & speedier things this time.


Medically, the bottom line is that he was in clinic yesterday and everything was pretty well normal, for him. He needed plateletes, so he couldn't get Velcade (which they rescheduled for today but he probably can't get because his counts are so low). He's going to get blood today, and they're hanging the usual rounds of antibiotics. The part that's really serious is that his kidney function is 50 percent That's a very bad thing. Its not uncommon for multiple myeloma patients to have kidney involvement, but so far Greg's have always been good. It could be related to dehyration because of the fevers. If that's the case, they can fix him up & he'll go on his merry way towards the transplant. (His BUN (whatever that is) is low too, so that's a good indicator that its dehydration, not MM). However, if its the multiple myeloma that's causing the kidney trouble, he may not be stable enough to get the transplant. There's a whole lot of drugs involved in the transplant that have to be filtered through the kidneys. We won't know for a few days what the source of the kidney trouble is. And, I won't believe anything until I hear it from Vij's mouth, anyway. Loyal readers will remember that the info changes from shift to shift, and in the end, we never know as much as we would like, anyway.

Oh, and he's developed severe, intermittent pain in his left shoulder. No one seems to know why, and no one seems to care, either. Its unrelated to his "Popeye" arm thing, as that's on the right side. Sometimes it feels like the wheels are really coming off. . . .

That's about all for now. I'll post more when I know something (or when they change their minds about what they've already told us).

Love,

Us