An update... Crisis... Resolution
All -
Because I am on some very serious painkillers, it is difficult for me to write. I have pasted an update that my mother e-mailed around to her friends. Soon I will take it down and replace it with a first-person version, but a lot of people have been asking for updates, so here is a third-person version.
“Dear Friends,
There’s a good reason for the saying “it’s not over till it’s over”…
So it was with Dan - just when we thought the worst was behind us. After 12 radiation sessions out of a total of 14 prescribed, we had to hospitalize him for severe burn to the esophagus - the cummulative effect of radiation. The pain was so severe that morphine did not help and the painkiller he got, Dilaudid, was several times stronger. He was in the hospital for a week, lost 10 lbs., and is still not able to eat even soft foods.
It was a harrowing time. The pain could not be controlled through regular IV push, so they put him on a pump where he could release the drug every time he felt the pain coming on, in addition to a baseline that was continuously delivered. He could not speak (it hurt) and the only thing that he could take in was water.
Dan was released Thursday last week, completed the 2 remaining treatments and is now recuperating at home. He is very weak, but slowly improving. The only food he’s able to have is very thin vanilla milk shake that I mix with protein powder, multi-vitamin, and other supplements. He is on Methadone (they weaned him off of the Dilaudid) which is also an opiate. This will take many weeks, during which time the esophagus will hopefully heal. We won’t know for another week or so if the last 2 treatments will worsen the situation again.
This child has gone through more torture in 9 months than most people go through in a lifetime! I have no words to describe how strong he has been through it all, despite the horrible pain and the fog of drugs. He had the doctors in stitches with the tale of a comedy of errors on the part of the nurses one night, which really was a particularly tough night for him. I would have fallen apart a long time time ago if he had not been the way he is. “
