7:42pm
Hello and welcome to Week 4 of Anne and Nathaniel learn about the liver. When last we saw our intrepid duo they were in hopes that Nathaniel’s eating would improve over the weekend and tickets home would be generated early this week.
Yeah, that didn’t happen.
Instead, we learned today that tomorrow the GI team is going to do another ERCP – an Endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography – a long thin tube with a camera on it to explore the liver and pancreas. You may remember that Nathaniel had an ERCP back on Wednesday the 15th, near the beginning of this saga. That did a lifesaving amount of work to clean stones, sludge, and pus out of Nathaniel’s liver. But his blood tests say that somewhere his body is (probably) still fighting an infection and the team has so far been unable to find the infection in question. They are going to go scope the liver a second time, clean out any remaining liver garbage, and possibly put in some stents if they’re needed, to ensure that bile drains out the bile duct and blood goes back into the blood system the way nature intended.
But that’s not all, folks, because we’ve got two big features for this week assuming the schedule allows! Nathaniel hasn’t been eating much because every time he does he gets severe abdominal pain. Like not bad enough to puke up his meals but certainly bad enough to discourage him from eating in the first place, and at this point, the man does not have the weight left to lose. But he hasn’t had a colonoscopy in 4 years so the good folks here are hoping that they can wedge a colonoscopy into Friday’s schedule — which honestly would be quite the thing because hospitals hate doing inpatient colonoscopies.
So Nathaniel is currently not allowed food after midnight, and may not be allowed to eat again until friday, all the name of getting him to eat more. Isn’t science a trip?
In the good-news column with a little help from yours truly, Nathaniel got his first true shower in 21 days and it too all the effort I could muster to convince him to leave the land of infinite hot water and get out of the shower. He is now in clean clothes in a freshly-made bed and if you’re not sure how wonderful that is, you could try it… just don’t do it anywhere that people will be able to smell you during those 21 days.
The dogs are in Petsmart for another week, getting more muzzle training, which is good. And I’m down at the hospital seeing how many days in a row my back can handle the current recliner before it demands an actual hotel room. We were able to get our ballots in for the election, and I’m working on Nathaniel’s medical benefits through medicare this week. Fun stuff!
Anyway, that’s the report. More tomorrow when he’s out of his ERCP, which hopefully I will sleep through.