Janice's Blog

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

The strange stroy of Ashton and Janice

It was Sunday, August 16 and my Aunt Chris and I had decided to take Janice to St. Joseph Hospital because her back pain was so out of control. I had loaded Janice into the car, and was heading out to get in myself when our phone rang. I waited for the answering machine to pick up so I could see who it was, and I heard our daughter in law Monica. She said that she and Kevin had taken our youngest grandson Ashton to emergency at St. Joseph, and that he was heading in for emergency surgery, as his appendix had failed. Their whole family had booked a week in Hawaii for a vacation, and they were supposed to leave early the next morning.

I figured I could catch up with them at the hospital, since that is where I was heading. As we waited in emergency to get Janice admitted, Chris went to find Kevin, who by now was next door at CHOC Children's Hospital, which is where Ashton's surgery was about to begin. There was a bit of confusion for Kevin when he saw us. Initially he figured we were there to visit Ashton, but I filled him in on what was happening with Mom, and suddenly we were all on the family plan.

Ashton and Janice were in the hospital for almost the same amount of days, and both had successful outcomes. If you are going to have two members of your family have to go to emergency, it's nice to have them there at the same time. You can really maximize your visiting hours that way.

The photo is of the two of them the first day they were both home. Ashton had three small incisions on his belly, and Janice had three targets on her belly that they used for her radiation treatments. The two of them will always have a very, very special connection to one another from this.

Monday, September 7, 2009

Janice feeling it in her back while in Scotland

Bad backs, pain mangaement and radiology

About midway through our Scotland trip, Janice started to feel sharp pain in her lower back. She remembered standing up suddenly while we were visiting Eilean Donan Castle at the Kyle of Lochalsh and feeling like she had pulled a back muscle. We decided to take an extra day off the road and stay put in our inn, using a heating pad and taking her prescription vicadin that we had brought along for pain.

One day turned to three, and I started to get very worried that instead of her back pain getting slowly better, it seemed to be getting slowly worse. I found a local hospital and took her to see a Scottish doctor, who prescribed her stronger pain medication. We managed to soldier through the rest of the trip, but it was a long and uncomfortable flight for her coming home.

Back in the US, her regular doctors got her on to stronger pain relief, but nothing was really eliminating the pain. She was scheduled to go in for an MRI on a Monday to see what was really going on, but that weekend I asked my aunt Chris, who is a nurse, to come and see Janice. She could see that Janice was getting dangerously dehydrated, and we decided to take her to emergency at St. Joseph's Hospital. She ended up spending five days in the hospital on various IV drips, with a pain management team working very diligently to balance her pain medication with her other basic body needs, like water, bowel regularity and not being completely doped up out of her mind. They also did the MRI and discovered that the source of her back pain was indeed the cancer. It has moved into her spine, and the bone loss was pinching her nerves. We began radiation therapy right away, as her ability to walk was being threatened.

The doctors were amazing. They got her stabilized, and she is not experiencing any pain currently. She is lucid, her bodily functions are under control, and the radiation therapy in her spine has resulted in her having flexibility that we never thought she would have again. She was released on August 20th, and we never dreamed that she would be returning on August 29th, this time because the cancer had moved into her lungs.

Liver cancer never really rests. It just lies in wait and when you let your guard slightly down, it attacks somewhere else. It's a really shitty disease.