NPO Until Bronchoscopy

They are sorry that he is not allowed to eat or drink anything until they do the bronchoscopy, and they are also sorry that they cannot predict whether he will even have the procedure today. Jon is unperturbed. As soon as they do this thing, he can start to get out of here.  If that means not eating all day, no big deal. They will certainly let him eat by dinnertime. Unlike me, he can just ignore hunger.  Does it all the time.

NPO is non per os. Nothing by mouth. We just looked it up.

It is cold and windy outside and we are not missing anything today. We both have plenty to do in this quiet room. Jon is basically just taking up a comfortable bed while they wait. He is on antibiotics but off oxygen. He feels good. We will have to get up and take a walk later.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Improving

I haven't been to see him myself yet today, but I hear that he is starting to express some angst about all the things he should be doing on the farm. This is good. It has been days since he even thought to pick up his phone, which certainly was an indication of how terrible he was feeling.  The NG tube was put in yesterday and they started feeding him right away, even though they didn't quite have the equipment in place to do it all to code. Rebecca says they manually pumped the formula, which must have been a challenge since the pace of delivery was supposed to be extremely slow and careful. By 10:00 last night, the charge nurse had installed the pump. They still didn't have all the right equipment but they managed to piece everything together and Jon was fed a small dribble of formula all night long. Today they are working on increasing the dosage, as his stomach shows that it can manage this. Things are looking up. Alissa and Rebecca went in this morning and Anna is taki...
Read more

Rolling Updates from the Waiting Room

I have to admit that we/I did not pay any attention to the details of what to expect today. We have done this a couple of times before, and I have hung out in this waiting room in years past. We were supposed to arrive at 6:30 to check in to Interventional Radiology so Jon could have a central line installed for cell collection. We did that, arriving right on time. They immediately took him back and gave me a number to watch on the board (no more names, just numbers). So I know that the patient is in pre-op. What I don't know is how long this takes, or how far I can wander. Nor do I know when we are expected at the next location for the hours-long pheresis event. Of course, there are reasons for this lack of attention. One is that we trust that we will be instructed as we go, and we are familiar enough with the hospital and its systems. Two is that the baby was the most important news, and this was much less interesting.  In brief, Rebecca had an appointment at 8 AM on Friday, the ...
Read more

Back Into the Hospital

Since the last report, a little over a year ago, Jon has been dealing with a lot of treatment-related symptoms. It has been a tough 15 months or so since he started on the Telqetamab. The main side effect was loss of taste, which led to a general loss of appetite and a struggle to eat. Through it all, Jon has continued to take care of us by cooking our dinners, maintaining so much at the farm, helping us to keep everything going. By about June, that treatment stopped being effective and the oncologists decided that he was strong enough to be a candidate for CAR-T (another long and involved process that can be described later, but it holds promise), even though he lost about 40 pounds in that year. His spirits were good, his energy was good, he had adapted to his loss of taste. The doctors prescribed a bridge treatment, something to keep the myeloma quiet if possible. It was known to have many dire side effects. Back to the decadron, a whomping amount of steroids that means very little ...
Read more