It's never easy

G phoned from dialysis. The nurse didn't understand the instructions from
the Drs. office regarding the blood test for Plavix. She called the Drs.
office but was put on hold forever....

So I called the Drs. office. Explained the problem, and someone did phone
the dialysis nurse right away.

The problem is the sheet requesting the blood test says "check Plavix level
day before surgery". I remember seeing this, thinking that wasn't correct,
but, stupid me, I didn't bother to question them. Ya would think by now
I would know better.

So, it's not the day before a surgery. G phoned me back to tell me all this,
...I won't bore you with our conversation, but I am waiting for a phone call
from the Dr. office.

I maintain the info on the sheet is wrong, that I heard the Dr. say
"Check if Plavix is working on him, because it doesn't on 20% of the
population, and if it's not working we can put him on Effient (I think)". Now, based on that comment, I don't think this test is related to
the surgery. I suspect normally they check the Plavix level/function, the same
way they want to check the INR clotting before surgery, to be sure the blood
will clot.

They haven't phoned me yet.

On another note, my Aunt (Mom's sister, age 81) isn't doing well. She has
been in hospitals, etc. for 12 weeks now. A couple of days ago they must
have given her some medicine for nausea, which made her nuts, she tore out
the feeding tube, didn't know who anyone was, etc.

I feel so bad for her family. Anyway, my cousin gave the name/address of the hospital, so I shipped off a photo album. It's one which belonged to our Grandmother, (who died before I was born) and this Aunt reorganized it in 1996, and passed to another Aunt, and then it came back to my Mom.

I love the old pictures, and since my Aunt who is ill
reorganized this photo album, I trust even if her memory is bad, she
will remember a lot of the photos.

As my mother use to say "Getting old is no fun".

Fingers Crossed re G

OK, back to the trials and tribulations of G.

Yesterday when G was at dialysis he phoned me, wanted me to come see him.
They wanted to take out the dialysis catheter, because they were afraid
it might be infected. He didn't think it was infected, that it just
looked a little bad because he wore a smaller pair of jeans for a few
hours the day before, and it pushed on the catheter.

The concern was if they took it out, he would have to go to the VA,
and they don't move very fast, and if something went wrong and they
wanted him to stay overnight he would miss his Dr. appt the next day,
with the top notch surgeon. This surgeon is the best one in town for
kidneys and does 90% of the transplants. He is double booked, and it
took 2 1/2 weeks to get the appointment.

So, G told them to not take out the catheter. They did a culture, to check
for infection.

Today we saw the surgeon, for about 2 minutes. He had 2 guys and the nurse
do most of the leg work. They changed their minds a couple of times what
they want to do first, but ended up first they will do a test to see if
the Plavix is in fact working (apparently it does not work on 20% of the
population). If it's not working, there is another drug they can
prescribe.

Then they will do some vein mapping to see how bad the veins are in his upper body/arm, because this surgeon thinks he can reconnect to the fistula in G's upper
left arm. It would be great to get a fistula working, as a back up for the PT
dialysis, assuming the surgery for that would be successful.

G may have too much scar tissue in his abdomen for it to work. They will
have to do some sort of invasive test to check it out, before they would
consider surgery.

This is so much more reassuring than what the stupid VA Dr. was going to
do. He just said "oh, I can do that surgery", and set up a date, without
doing any thinking, checking, etc. What a cowboy. And now I realize he
probably would have done that surgery, and screwed it up so there would
be scar tissue which would prevent Peritoneal Dialysis. Like I said,
the surgeon said there could be too much scar tissue to prevent the
fluids from flowing properly do to dialysis. But, this is why
they want to check it out before trying to even do the surgery.


So, at least we feel better.

Oh, and we asked the surgeon to look at the catheter and he said "that's
not infected", so G certainly made the correct decision yesterday.