It’s been a while…

Things have been crazy.

So let’s seeeeeee….

My Dad has a disease called MDS where basically his bone marrow doesn’t work. It started about 8 years ago, and he has already surpassed the average life expectancy of someone with this condition by several years. He also has stage 4 prostate cancer. Don’t get me started about how the dr kept saying, well you must just be one of those men that have high numbers. The prostate cancer was discovered last June. He was having some issues and the dr went into his bladder and surprise, there was a big wad of cancer in there from his prostate.

Without his bone marrow working he has to have his hemoglobin levels checked on a regular basis. The average man has a level of 14. My dad’s is much lower, even after a transfusion. The New Year weekend he was complaining of being light headed and feeling dizzy, and of course the blood place was closed on Monday. Tuesday he called me and asked me to drive him to the hospital where he gets blood drawn for blood transfusions because he knew his levels were really low so he would need one. He figured that way he could go get typed and cross matched and then get blood on Wednesday at 9:30. When we got to the out patient center he asked me to go and get a wheel chair for him (he also had polio when he was a kid, so he has a hard time walking as it is…) and I wheeled him up. They got him in, everyone knows who he is and they were all very nice…and then I drove back the 1/2 hour and he asked me to go in and pay his rent for him because he was still really dizzy. When I came back out he was on the phone with his dr. He had it on speaker phone so I could hear the whole thing. She was telling him his level was 4.6 and he needed to go to the emergency room.

 

He did not want to go to the emergency room, but I was the one driving, so away we went. The entire time he kept saying that he could totally wait till the next day. He called the emergency room and asked to talk to a nurse and he said, my dr just told me that my hemoglobin levels were 4.6, it’s totally ok to wait till 9:30 for my transfusion, right?? And the nurse just said, please tell me you aren’t driving sir…

 

We only waited about 5 min in the waiting room, and they hooked him right up to the heart thing because once you get below 5 it is life threatening. Everyone we came into contact with said I did the right thing….

 

He ended up staying over night and getting 4 units of blood.

He was good for a week and then he started feeling weird again.This past Monday instead of going to get his bloodwork done he called his dr and told her that he was feeling really dizzy again, and she told him to go to the emergency room. This time his levels were 5.4. What in the world? When he was released he was 9.7, and then 8.5 the next week. That was a bigger jump than normal. Usually he gets 2 units of blood and it goes down a few points until he gets below 7 which is when they put blood in him again. He ended up in the hospital for 2 nights, 4 units of blood, and they scoped him to see if he had a leak somewhere.

 

AND AND AND!

He had some bone scans done. When they first came back he said that they looked pretty good. But then he said that the dr might want to do some radiation on some part.

 

I don’t like this, I don’t like this one bit!

I had to watch my mother wither up and die of cancer in 2007. It was a horrifying experience.

Ugh ugh ugh

 

OD is such a good therapist. This is why I am so empty inside right now. I am so down…I wish my Dad was better.

me