Sorry, this update may be less coherent than usual. Today's kind of a blur. Not because a lot happened; quite the opposite, i just haven't documented much and i'm forgetting everything. Stress.
This morning was even better than yesterday on the scale of awake, alert, and cognizant. Whole conversations, feeling well, sitting up and keeping her eyes open. Blood was drawn around 6am, and her calcium value was 9.9, juuuuust in side that 9-10 range that we were shooting for. They did draw more blood around noon, but it's 9pm now and we still haven't heard all the results from that. Her hemoglobin was 8.9 though, which is great; she was a 6 before the transfusion, and it needs to be above 8.
We watched Bake Off until she fell asleep.
The MRI she was supposed to have at midnight had gotten pushed forward to 1am, and then to some nebulous "in the morning" time, then by the time they brought lunch up, it was supposed to be 3pm. She's not allowed to eat up to 6 hours before the MRI, so she wasn't able to eat her lunch. The nurse suggested that she eat and the MRI could be pushed to 6, but Amanda did not want that; she just wanted the damn scan done at this point, so she refused to eat. I bravely took one for the team.
After i'd finished her lunch, they moved the MRI up to 4pm.
This is where things started to go downhill. Shortly after that, the nurse helped her to the bathroom, and as she was sitting back down in bed after, she vomited, despite having basically nothing in her stomach.
At 1:30, unannounced, the imaging people showed up to take her for the MRI. All these delays and suddenly they're early.
She vomited again as they were putting her in the machine.
When she came back, the nurse ordered her another lunch, which surprisingly arrived within minutes. She ate a surprisingly good portion of it, probably 1/3 of what was offered. And then she vomited it all back up.
The nurses consulted with the doctors to get her meds adjusted, to try and get the vomiting under control. I overheard that they were still giving her oxycodone for pain management. I told them the same thing i mentioned in yesterday's update: in her experience, oxy has not been as good for managing her pain as hydrocodone is, and oxy has historically made her nauseous, where hydro does not. One of the nurses told me they could make that suggestion to the doctor, but he couldn't guarantee that the doctor would switch the meds. Later, he told us that he'd been looking it up and oxy is more powerful and fast acting, so it should be the better drug, but Amanda suggested that that's probably the problem. It's too powerful for her system, especially right now. Within an hour the doctor approved the switch, so she'll be getting hydrocodone acetaminophen (Vicodin) now. Hopefully this helps her keep her food down.
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it took me over 6 hours to write this. it's 11:45 pm now and my brain has stopped working for the day. i know there was more i meant to write in this update, but i'm blanking on all of it at this point. if i remember the rest of today, tomorrow morning, i'll add more.
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