Saturday - November 24 (Day-37)

Thursday and Friday were more of the same. The “same” consists of I.V. bottles eighteen hours a day, white blood cell count remaining near zero, blood cultures done because of a spike in temperature, four tubes of blood drawn every morning at 3:30 A.M., vital signs every two hours, continued mouth sores, and lack of appetite. Jan had the same breakfast, lunch, and dinner on Thanksgiving Day and on Friday…….Instant Breakfast in the morning, soup and Boost for lunch, and soup and yogurt for dinner. For lunch and dinner on Thanksgiving I had chopped vegetable lasagna. While I’m certain it was nutritious, it was not quite the lasagna that my dad fixed as I was growing up.

This morning around 5:30 A.M. Jan woke up with chest pains on the right side of her chest which extended all the way to her back. The severity of the pain increased for the next hour causing the nurses and doctors to huddle and begin to order tests and pain meds. She was given three injections of morphine which really did not help the pain very much. Two separate EKGs were run, an X-ray machine was brought into the room to obtain a chest X-ray, more blood cultures were ordered so a separate I.V. line had to be inserted, and around 10:45 Jan was taken for a contrast Cat-scan. The doctors are speculating that some activity is going on in her right lung. They plan to wait on the test results and adjust her medications as necessary. In the meantime, stronger pain meds have been ordered and will be administered as needed to keep her somewhat comfortable. We also continue to wait for lab results that will indicate that her white count is going up. According to the attending physician, it’s possible that if any sort of problem exists in her lung, the few white cells which are in her system have relocated to that area, and thus are not identified in her daily blood sample.