A New Dawn, A New Day…

The next day, Tuesday, I awoke filled with gloom and doom, and trying to fight it off. I’d recently received emails from other royal family members going through trial and talking about how God had shown Himself in big and small ways. I sure hadn’t seen any of that the day before. It was just chaos, confusion, lots of dull, uncomfortable waiting and gloom and doom.

Well, every time I whine about such things, God makes me feel like the stupid sheep that I am. About 10am I arrived at the hospital, walked up to the front  desk to find out where they’d put my mother last night,  telling Him I’d love it if she could be back in Neurology with the large private room, the quiet floor, the excellent nurses, the big window… and she was.

As I walked down the long main hall toward her wing, I passed Heather, who had been her nurse for two days the last time she was there. I thought Heather had been an awesome nurse. “Boy, Lord, it would be cool if Heather could be Mother’s nurse this time.”  And of course… she was.

I had been trusting the Lord for the timing regarding meeting up with the doctors at the hospital — always a challenge because no one can ever tell you when they’ll come by. As I walked onto Mother’s floor and to the nurse’s station, there was her hospital doctor (who’d replaced the ER doc as soon as she was admitted to the hospital)– he was also the doctor she’d had the last time she’d been there. He was on the phone, saying as he looked at me, “Oh, here she comes now.”

So we talked, he told me all of what was going on, how he was treating Mother as if she had pneumonia until it was proven otherwise and how she’d agreed to have the lung fluid drained after all. They’d already done the ultrasound to pinpoint where the needle should be inserted and were just waiting for me to get there to do the procedure because she had insisted they wait.

So I went to her room to find her getting a bath. She’d even eaten breakfast. Soon the pulmonary doc came in. He was GREAT. He explained that they would drain out the fluid to help her breathe more easily, to maybe ease the pain in her back, to see how long it would take the lung to fill back up,  and yes, to test for tumor cells and bacteria, but this last was not the main reason for the procedure. Moreover, when they put the mark on her back for where the needle was to be inserted (based on the ultrasound) she said that was exactly the spot where her back was hurting.

The needle was not huge, and wasn’t even in there for very long, because he inserted a very soft and flexible catheter attached to a vacuum tube to actually drain the fluid. She was awake and seated in the room, with only some Novocaine to deaden the skin where the needle would enter.

The procedure went off without a hitch and was virtually painless. He took out almost 2 liters of fluid. It wasn’t anything like the ER doc had said it would be; not only was the needle not huge, but it wasn’t to be stuck into the lung at all, but into the pooling of fluid, and furthermore,  in the 19 years he’d been doing this procedure he had never once  collapsed anyone’s lung.

In addition to all that, it turns out he knew my mother’s oncologist, even specifically chose him to work with on certain procedures, and had only good things to say about him. In fact, the pulmonary doc’s wife had had breast cancer and he said he wished Mother’s oncologist had been her doctor instead of whoever it was his wife had had.

Mother was feeling better. No more morphine, just vicodin. I got to eat at O’Naturals (their “fast food naturally” cafe which I love), and there were times with some of the various personnel who came into the room where we all were just laughing our heads off over some joke or funny thing. When I left tonight, she was watching her flat screen TV with the captions turned on — and she could apparently read them.

So I can no longer say the Lord has not shown Himself, because His hand has been all over the place. LOL!

There were down sides, of course  — the pain remained to some degree after the tap, so the lung doctor thinks it’s probably a tumor. Also, the ultrasound showed the liver is enlarged (in addition to having the terrible numbers that the blood tests showed yesterday), and it is just under the lung from which he drew the fluid. So a tumor there might account for the pain as well. After he talked to the oncologist, the latter left a message on my cell (as I was walking through the dead zone of the main hall) regarding their talk —  that the cancer had returned and I need to get Mother into his office ASAP for a change of treatment. Since supposedly she’s going to be discharged tomorrow (probably early afternoon) we have an appointment for 3:30 with him.

Also on the down side: the skin on her swollen legs has started tearing and weeping blood and fluid, so I’m not sure how we’re going to deal with that. But that’s tomorrow’s problem.

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