morrowlife

Here are my new monitors. I got them for the conference at which I’m exhibiting in February. One of them is currently sitting on my desk, though, being burned in. Maybe I should burn in the other one too. I’ll have to think about that. Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPad-cam, taken in my living room the other day, and part of my famous Electronics series.

Okay, even I will admit that’s not exactly Great Art. But it comes as close as I can today. And all of my Loyal Readers should definitely buy some of those [amazon text=excellent monitors&asin=B008A3KFB8]. And they should of course click on my link to buy them.

Well. It’s been quite a weekend. Shannon was scheduled for the long-awaited bronchoscopy on Saturday morning so we could finally find out what’s going on inside her lungs. Instead, they told her she has pleurisy and they didn’t need to find out what was inside her lungs. So they didn’t do it. Again. It’s now rescheduled for tomorrow morning. Sigh.

She’s had a pretty rough time of things the past couple of days. Sunday morning started pretty much as usual. They unhooked her from her IV pump long enough for her to take a shower and the day started. I came over to the hospital in the morning, worked for an hour or two, and then left to go back to the hotel to do Shannon’s and my laundry. After spending a couple of fairly relaxing hours sitting outside and reading while the laundry washed and dried itself, I folded everything, put my stuff back in my room, and headed back to the hospital with Shannon’s stuff.

I was pretty much shocked by what I found there. She had suddenly become extremely weak, to the point that she could barely get out of bed or even speak in a complete sentence. She has remained pretty much that way since. I wrote an email to her doctor asking for his help and he came over today to see what was going on. He took a look at her latest blood work and discovered her electrolyte levels had fallen dangerously low due to fluid loss brought on my the diuretics they’ve been giving her for several days to try to remove the fluid from her lungs and chest cavity. He started her on fairly high doses of potassium and magnesium and said we should see rapid improvement.

Sadly, she started improving, but fairly quickly stopped and even got a bit worse, I believe. When I left the hospital a little after 9:00 this evening, she once again couldn’t stand up or even sit up in bed. I don’t think she’s dying, but I’m very worried about her. We need to get this figured out and fast.

On the positive side, her white cell count is falling, as it should as a result of the round of chemo she just finished. The blasts are above 70% now, if I heard correctly, so it’s pretty clear she still needs frequent chemo to remain in remission. While the doctor was here, I talked with him briefly about how this would be a very convenient time for us to get another stem cell transplant. He’s promised to look into it after she’s back on her feet and cured from the pneumonia/pleurisy.

On that front, the infectious disease doctor was over this afternoon. He mentioned a lot of things that could be going on, but he thinks the most likely reason the antibiotics haven’t completely cured her is that there might be some virus (she originally had influenza A, as my Loyal Readers will recall) or fungus in there too. So he’s adding a bunch of antivirus and antifungal medications and pushing hard for the bronchoscopy tomorrow so we’ll know for sure. There are all kinds of other obscure things that could also explain the problem, which is why he thinks the test is so important. It really needs to happen.

As far as I’m concerned, pleurisy sounds like a 19th century disease. Maybe they should check her for consumption and ague while they’re at it.

And that’s about it for today. I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this exciting Morrowlife Employment Agency job opportunity: beer-stealing pig! And the best part is that there’s definitely an immediate opening.

See you tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 20th, 2014 at 11:11 pm and is filed under electronics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.