4/19/12 - Transition Day

The day started out great. When I got to the hospital, the first thing I heard was that they were removing the despised nose tube. Here's one final shot with a happy John ready to send it on its way. Last time, he didn't lose it for days and it came out accidentally with a sneeze.

I love this picture of the nurses working on the tubes and John's WTF face :)

ta-da!

The next good news was that the epidural was on its way out. Last time, we had a really hard transition from the epidural to the IV meds so we were nervous about this. It's pretty easy for the pain to get ahead of the drugs and some people don't respond awesomely well to morphine. Apparently, John is one of those. So we spent the day in a balancing act of pain vs nausea. Puking would be bad with a freshly stapled stomach and we know from last time that the pain is not manageable without a steady dose of the drugs. But the morphine makes him nauseous. We had couple doses of anti-nausea IVs and kept the equilibrium in check. It's hard though. Certainly it could have gone better, but I think that we did a good job and most importantly, it went about a million times better than last time. As a distraction, I painted his toes.  Blue and gold (the colors of my alma mater, but he's been made an honorary member of my hometown, so we'll consider his Warrior Pride legit)

We heard that it was National High Five Day, so we couldn't miss that.

and every once in a while he would pass out so this was my view, cozied up in the chair with a book looking out at the rain.

We took one last walk before I left to go to dance class and I just talked to him on the phone and he sounds great. It was a hard day, but he was a champ and we were a great team and at the end of this, what matters is that we make it through. The nurses think its cute that we know exactly what to do and what to expect and I'm halfway afraid they're going to start assigning me tasks with other patients. They also think that John is awfully cute and quite a charmer and while I totally agree, I have to say that the competition up there in the cancer ward isn't very stiff and I'll be glad to get him out of there. Again, we're grateful to the staff at Providence for being so cool.

Today was rough and we are both exhausted but we made it, like we always make it, with jokes and high fives and "I love you." Go team.