Drat. Admitted Tonight.

Jon has been feeling worse and worse and started to feel hopeless about ever feeling better. His appointment today was at 1:30 and he spent the whole morning in bed, sleeping and being miserable. He ate a bowl of cereal, dutifully, before we walked over. (Yesterday we took the shuttle to the hospital and on the way back out, he got into a wheelchair to cut his own return walk in half. That's how bad he was feeling.)

When we got to the IPOP, they started testing him for everything again. Blood cultures in addition to the usual lab tests. Gave him a bag of potassium while he was sitting around waiting for various results. After a very long time, Julie, the NP who is the most likely to try to look at every possibility, decided he should have a CT scan to see if there might be a new infection. (I like CT scans when they are looking for pneumonia. In my view, X-rays never find it. CT scans do.) All of this took a long time because it is a holiday and there aren't many people working today.  Jordan, the nurse who seems to be there for us the most, said that she tried to get them to rush some medicines over for someone and she asked if they could just send it over with the robot. The answer, no kidding, was "the robot doesn't work on holidays." She didn't know what to say to that. What does that even mean? There is a robot union?

At 6:30, Julie finally has consulted with enough people, even if the CT scan hasn't been officially read yet. She tells us they want to put him in a bed overnight to keep an eye on him.  Meaning, he is getting admitted. The hospital wing practically shares a wall with the 5th floor IPOP -- you just go through two more sets of doors and then you are in a bona fide hospital. 

Within minutes, they were hooking him up to all the monitoring stuff, putting him on oxygen because his oxygen saturation level was sometimes as low as 85. It has been low for days. Whenever they ask if he is short of breath, he says no because he is a literalist. He means, if I walk slower, I can still breathe. I say, he is taking more breaths per minute than he usually does, and his breaths are shallower. 

So, maybe this is what happened. He did have his backyard fireworks cytokine response syndrome on Wednesday, and they managed that event and kept him out of the hospital. But he has had a cough through the entire process. On about Thursday the cough got worse. More worse on Friday and harder to breathe. By Saturday he was sick. So while we were thinking that he was having a response to the CAR-T cells, he was really developing pneumonia. It is hard to tell the difference when there is a fever in both cases, people feel bad in both cases. I started to think that his stomach sadness might be related to the round the clock antibiotics. His stomach generally hates antibiotics. We have been pumping those in since Thursday. He lost his appetite on Saturday. It's just hard to untangle all the symptoms, but Julie says the inflammation response has gone down in his bloodwork, so that's what told her this was something else.

Jon hates being in the hospital. They tie you down with all the heart monitors and oxygen sensor and IV line and dripping this and that. Never mind the parade of people who have to ask all the same questions. This particular hospital setting overlaps with the IPOP so he had to do the handwriting sample and all the cognitive tests tonight when he was admitted. All of that is fine. What they don't do is ask if you are hungry, which he never is, and so he will have had one bowl of cereal today and most of an orange. He said to the resident who was checking him in -- the trouble with hospitals is, once they have you, they never want to let you go. She said, we will do our best to get you of here.  I don't think they have a plan yet for how to tackle the pneumonia since it isn't an official diagnosis yet. Just watching him and giving him oxygen.

I left him watching football. He will be lonely and discouraged, but I am sure they will take care of him. I will go back in the morning, trying to get there before the doctors come through.