Day 6

Leaving off from yesterday's post....I finally had to wake Dad about 3:30 so I could order him some food. I took his vitals first and his temperature was at 102.6...yikes! So I called the nurse and she came up right away and got him on an iv bag of sodium chloride (saline). He wasn't the least bit hungry but managed to eat a few bites of soup, cottage cheese, and a few bites of pears. They keep saying how important it is to at least get some food down the gullet. The chemo has stripped out the lining of the stomach and that's why he has diarrhea (everybody gets that at this point). It's important to keep food flowing through the system so it starts to return to its normal state when the cells begin to start forming again.

The nurses change shift at 7:00 so the evening nurse came up right away to touch base about Dad. His fever around 10:00 was 102 so it was heading in the right direction. By then the drip of saline had finished. They hesitate to give tylenol to lower the temp because it can disguise the problem...it can take the fever down with the cause still in effect. They do have an upper limit ...and then they would use tylenol...but Dad's temp wasn't to that level.

The night nurse, Pat, is very nice and helpful. She said to give her a call anytime. It wasn't that much later and I had to call her again. I took Dad's blood pressure and it was 98 over 55 and when that upper systolic number is lower than 100...you call the nurse right away. So Pat came up and took Dad's blood pressure sitting, laying, standing...and determined that the lower pressure was most likely from dehydration (since he is losing fluids with diarrhea, and with his fever...the body uses fluids with a fever to try to cool off the different organs. The body is so amazing!) so she got a bag of saline to drip throughout the night and into the morning.

All Dad really wanted to do was sleep all the time (which Pat said was normal since his white blood cells are gone and everything else is low and the fever causes that, too), but it's very important for him to walk if he can for his lungs. A person is very prone to pneumonia when sedentary. So Nurse Ratchet went into second gear and got him out of bed to walk. We borrowed a wheel chair and Dad held on to the handles and pushed the wheelchair ...for a bit of extra support and in case we got down to the end of the hall and he felt light headed. So we walked the hall here on our floor. Amazingly, Dad walked 4 or 5 passes and just gutted it out, even though he would have loved to be lying in bed. That was at 6:00. At 8:00 we got another walk in with only 3 or 4 lengths of the hall...but not bad considering he had a 102 temp. When he's not walking, every 2 hours he has to use the spirometer....it helps your lungs. I can't remember if I've shown a picture of it on the blog or not. Here's it is:

To exercise your lungs, you exhale away from the machine, then put the mouthpiece in your mouth and inhale slowly, making the center white platform rise to the top. It's a good lung workout. Dad had an advantage...I think left-over days of swimming was the key.

I took Dad's temp during the middle of the night and at 2:30 it was down to 99.9. The nurse came in at 5:30 for the usual blood draw and to administer the antibiotic. At 6:30 Dad's temp was 100.6...still way better than yesterday. He was actually hungry this morning and he ate a really good breakfast...Denver omelet, hash browns, OJ, grapefruit, coffee. So that is really doing good for him, since he hasn't been very hungry for several days.

So we're off to see the doctor this morning and then we'll be walking the halls for awhile. He's still pretty sleepy when he's not sitting up and eating...so it's anybody's guess what his blood counts will be. I'll let you know later ...after our doctor visit.