Day 2 / 100 - Psychadelic Baby

Richard's hanging in there. His chemo/anti nausea drug-induced hiccups are driving him pretty batty and draining all his energy due to the constant muscle contractions. Last night he decided to bite the bullet and take the crazy hiccup-curing med that gives him hallucinations.

It helped get rid of them for a sleep. A crazy sleep, but nonetheless, sleep. Now they're back again.

The hiccups were getting so bad last night that he was literally gasping to catch his breath. You know... when you're so scared that your eyes get really big with fear. That was what he looked like at about 1:30am. He was so uncomfortable and in pain from the hiccups that he decided to go sit in the chair at the end of the bed. His hiccups and gasps were scaring me awake periodically and that big gasp/choke had me really scared. He was down at the end of the bed where he cannot reach the nurse-calling button. Now, yes, he did eventually catch his breath, but not before I had gotten the okay from him to push the button myself in hopes that maybe they could give him oxygen or something. Jinkies, I don't know. I didn't know if that would help, but my non-medical common sense said "can't get enough oxygen = give oxygen".

Oh ya and at that point he was starting to feel nauseated and was trying to throw up.

The nurse came and more or less said (nicely, of course... she's a really great nurse) that there isn't much she can do aside from offering the hiccup-curing med that Richard didn't really want. She didn't think the oxygen would help, but obliged with our request.

She headed off to go order/get the med and in the mean time, Richard sat over the edge of the bed with the oxygen tubes in his nose and taking deep breaths. I don't know if there's any scientific reason for the that helping or if it was just something new for him to focus on aside from the hiccups.

Anyhow, it was a rough night, but he did get sleep. He said his 6 hour or so sleep was filled with so many crazy hallucinations and stuff that it felt like a long 12 hour (but not enjoyable 12 hours) sleep.


*****

Things I forgot to add yesterday.

I may have made it sound like the procedure of the tranfusion of stem-cells was 'not-a-big-deal'. It, in fact, could have been scary, hence the fact that the doctor stays close by for a couple hours and the nurse stayed in the room for two or so hours too to keep a close eye on him.

So, the transfusion itself was uneventful which was wonderful.

But, once the grapht starts to get comfy in a couple weeks, we'll see then what kind of havoc it tries to reek.

As Richard words it, he says that in two weeks:

The new stem cells will start to get comfy and then they'll wake up and look around and say, "What the heck!? This isn't our liver... Let's kill it! Hey! What the heck!? These aren't our kidneys! Let's kill them! Hey! This isn't our body! We don't belong here! Let's get out of here."

So we'll see how that goes. I'm staying pretty positive right now. It really helped that the tranfusion went so smoothly. It kind of makes it seem like 'normal'. Normal, meaning what normal is right now, not actually normal. Keeps me a little calm.

The thing I'm worried about is him passing out from his hiccups while no one's in the room.

Right now, he doesn't have the hiccups, so maybe, possibly, they're on the way out.

Let's hope so.