Pumped Up

Normally being pumped up is considered a good thing. However, when you have to have your food pumped into you it isn’t an ecstatic mood that is felt. After many delays, clerical errors, and suffering, my father is finally hooked up to a feeding tube and pump here at home. Osmolite 1.5 Cal is the liquid food of choice. Good thing it is bypassing the tastebuds and even better thing that I had already eaten before opening the cans.

First feeding is 16 hours overnight, not counting any breaks. Since he’s far too weak to set up, maintain, or flush the tube, I’m going to have to keep an even more constant eye on him. If things go well for the first two hours, I’ll sneak out to buy some cat food at Kwik Trip.

Now that the regime is laid out, I’m wondering how anything is going to get done outside of the house. Up to 18 hours of feeding a day is on the schedule for the first week! Much of this is due to slowly ramping up the milliliters per hour rate to something faster. If not done, the body may not handle the fluids well.

I’m going to have to check with friends to find a urinal, there’s no way he’s wheeling the pump all the way to the bathroom or disconnecting from it himself. This house is not designed with invalids in mind, having been built in the 1800s. The last two days have been exhausting in every way possible, but I hope that he can gain some strength now.

Right now he looks like an animate cadaver. This all took way too long from the last ER visit thanks to the ridiculous hoops that have to be jumped through to meet rules and regulations. Dad is so weak now that I wonder if he’ll ever recover.

However, I have seen seeing starving animals make a turnaround into bright eyed critters. I can only hope and pray that this will be the case here.

A Multicourse Meal of Spam

Though Google and Microsoft have made targeting spammers world wide a priority the last couple of years, the spam still keeps coming. That’s true for referral spam targeting blogs especially Blogger and Wordpress hosted ones. Clearing out my back log of more than questionable referrals highlights the wide variety of spam out there.

Remember folks to never click on strange or suspicious links in your referrals – or anywhere else for that matter. Leave it to people crazy or secured enough to investigate the trash that gets past the junk filters.

As an appetizer, I present a tastefully designed site, http : // hand-made-soaps . com / homemade-lotion-recipes /, that offers recipes and tip on making your own soaps. This is not something normally associated with spammers, since they tend to be a dirty lot who don’t get out of their small apartments very often. Looks bland enough, but it hides a potent kick.

Iconic Spam

Remember when making icons for apps was all the rage? You don’t?! Well, a flood of referral spam to my Blogger site has filled me with nostalgia for the Windows 3.1 era of the early 1990s. All of the following spam traces back to Aha-soft in Canada as the screen captures will show.

Remember never to click on strange referral links showing up on Blogger stats. Leave that to crazy people like me armored up with security, virtual PCs, and anonymous web browsing capabilities.

The spam deluge began with http: // www . badaicons . com/ which leads to a page selling icons for Samsung smartphone apps. Clearly this is aimed at developers creating apps rather than end users.

Digging deeper into the links, it turns out the pages are part of a larger site, www . aha-soft . com, with redirects galore from their many domain names. They appear to be a real company out of Vancouver, Canada selling royalty free icon libraries plus software to view and create them.

Tube

Having finished yet another consult with a different specialist, a plan is in place to insert a feeding tube into my father. An attempt will be made to run one down through his nose and if that fails a surgically implanted one will be required. Anything more drastic will have to wait until chemo is long over with.

In the meantime, we are sitting at a small waiting area across from the department's check out desk. A mistake in the computerized order form means it has to be resubmitted just to get another consulting appointment schedule.

Remember when computers were supposed to make everything happen faster?

That question probably dates me, doesn't it?

I'd throw a third question in here, but progress is being made on the scheduling. That ruins my riffing for now. Thursday morning the tube down the nose will be tried, so only two days from now.

Printout time.

Waiting

It is a dreary Sabbath day with gray skies and the promise of rain returning as I type this post. Dad hit rock bottom in a sudden turn on Friday that led to another visit to the emergency room on Saturday for a bag of saline to deal with dehydration. With the full liquid diet becoming unbearable to him due to no appetite or will power, a feeding tube will need to be surgically inserted some time this week. Monday is the day we’ll know when.

Malnutrition is causing problems, ranging from swollen feet to an inability to keep warm. We were fortunate that the oncology specialist handling my father’s case happened to be on call this weekend and the doctor on duty ran into him. Since the endoscopy results show the cancer completely gone, the remaining two chemotherapy sessions may be halved in dosage or even dispensed with. Prednisone will be removed from the RCHOP no matter what is decided.

Fiddling About the Edges

When one has a chronic illness, especially something that saps all energy like CFS, they need to find small things to do to keep from going stir crazy. For me, that's usually playing video games. What to do when even that is hard?

Well, I'm tweaking old review posts in an effort to clean up the formatting and tell search engines not to follow internal links. A small experiment at having an automated list making widget back on the blog produced the results I expected, that being a drop in search engine presence. Google may claim that the nofollow attribute is only needed in some cases, but it looks to me that they punish internal linking far more than they say.

I'd toyed with changing the links for some time so this was simply a tedious endeavor requiring time and no creativity. Something that requires no brain cells firing? Perfect for how I feel at the moment!

Well, that and dish washing which is weeks worth now. But that takes more energy. Like Pa Kettle, I'll get around to it one of these days.

Notes for the next review are nearly complete, so I'm on schedule there despite all the interruptions, crises, and exhaustion. Still need to do more work on the Sunday school lesson coming up in several days.

Life goes on.

Time Isn't Flying

Once again a long day at Gundersen has begun, with an endoscopy about to be performed on my father. Like all things medical, preparation and paperwork take up hours before the main event. These days, I've come to believe this is more draining than the more dramatic events.

After the procedure is over, we'll have a much clearer picture of what needs to be done to get his stomach functioning correctly again. An update to this post will cover the results of the exploration.

UPDATE: While final results and analysis have yet to be given, the pictures indicate that the opening of the stomach into the small intestine is tiny. Once again it was impossible to pass through it for a deeper look, this time due to the opening being far too rigid to pass anything by. This would fit with the scar tissue theory.

Biopsy samples were taken for CMV culturing. Initial suggestion is a feeding tube inserted into the small intestine, but Dad wants to continue trying the full liquid diet. Hopefully more will be decided once all the data is in.

The last few days have been particularly hard due to the ongoing nutritional issues and growing difficulties with Dad's behavior. Irrational outbursts and fuzzy reasoning has made him a handful to deal with. I'm being run into the ground in the process.

Side effect of medication mixed with poor sleep and no real food is not a good combination. I suspect many a family member or caretaker have gone through this hidden cost of cancer. Severe illness affects far more people than just the one struck ill.

In the end, all you can do is endure and try to help. The hardest part is learning when the loved one is not fully in control of their faculties. They certainly aren't able to tell themselves, so conflict is guaranteed.

So much forgiveness is required. Patience will get exhausted eventually, so forget about relying on that exclusively to get through things.