I finally had a chance to talk with Emily again about how she’s doing on the front lines in the emergency room in Boston. I was surprised to hear that her hours are being cut! What? We’re in middle of a pandemic! Don’t we need our doctors right now?
Apparently her hospital is going broke. No one is doing any “elective surgery” which is where most of the hospital’s income comes from. No income, no money for salaries.
It sounds crazy to me. But then this morning, a local newsletter I get via email said the same thing about New Mexico.
“Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center yesterday placed 300 employees on temporary leave for up to 90 days, with CEO Lilian Montoya citing close to a 35% decline in patients and a $10 million-per-month drop in revenue since the state implemented stay-at-home orders and banned doctors from performing non-essential services. Lovelace Health System also confirmed to the Albuquerque Journal yesterday it is making “difficult workforce decisions” that will affect 15% of its staff, approximately 630 people. Two hospitals in Las Cruces also say they are cutting staff.”
Laura, you’ll like this one. Good job staying home, Santa Clara County!
Sorry I’m failing to post the link for that picture, but if you go to the bottom of this website, https://healthweather.us/ , there will be a link for “‘A Tale of Two Counties – Atypical Illness Trends for Santa Clara and Miami-Dade County’ Posted March 20, 2020”
While I’m posting stuff from the internet, here’s a comic:
It’s a cold, gray, dreary day and John and I are in week two of quarantine. So I’ve come up with a couple of grocery games to pass the time.
The first game is “Take Stock of the Pantry”. With the procurement of groceries becoming hit-and-miss, it’s time to make good use of what’s already in the pantry. How old is the stuff lurking in there, anyway?
Here’s my entry for the oldest pantry item:
Does that say 2009? Yep, I’m thinking so. That’s over a decade ago! This baby went from Albuquerque to California and back. It’s probably been moved half a dozen times at least.
Narcisco to El Padro to Hampton, then possibly a week in Homesteads before going on to Calle la Paz, then to either Vista del Prado or back to Homesteads, then finally to Lawrence. I know that sentence made no sense – I was counting moves. This fine can of salmon resided in 6-7 houses.
We don’t eat canned salmon (obviously). I don’t remember buying it all those years ago. I was probably trying to buy tuna and goofed. At any rate, it was a long, long time ago. I can guarantee there’s no COVID-19 clinging to that can of salmon.
The second fun game I’ve been playing all week is “Online Grocery Checkout”. There are a variety of home delivery options available for grocery delivery, but the systems are becoming overwhelmed by the all the new customers. The delivery workers are overworked and underpaid and are talking about striking.
I’m trying to tip well, and I’ve also got gift cards taped to my door, but as a whole I think delivery services are being undervalued by consumers as well as by the companies in the delivery service.
I keep two different online grocery carts full – Whole Foods delivered by Amazon, and Sprouts delivered by Instacart. I periodically attempt to checkout. Invariably, there are no delivery time slots available to select. Except every once in a while there suddenly is a delivery slot available! Score! I quickly check out, not even remembering what might be in my cart. Hopefully not canned salmon.
Then groceries magically show up at my door; bags full of items that closely resemble the items I had at one point put in my online cart. I think the shoppers are doing a darn good job. It’s really hard to buy items that you aren’t familiar with. It takes forever trying to puzzle it out.
For example, do you have any idea how many different kinds of Rice Dream Rice Milk there are? There’s vanilla classic, and vanilla enriched, and original classic organic, and original enriched organic, and there’s original enriched organic unsweetened, and original enriched organic sprouted rice unsweetened, all in different sizes…there’s probably couple of dozen different variations at least, no seriously, it’s crazy. These are just a few of the options.
And that’s just rice milk. They also make coconut milk and almond milk with the same packaging, and presumably also all with various classic or enriched and/or unsweetened and/or organic options. It’s endless!
And someone making not nearly enough money is having to stand there in the virus-infested grocery store and figure it all out. And text their customer asking permission to make substitutions. And wait for a reply and then go back to that section after they get a reply. Or they don’t get a reply and they just have to make their best guess. Then they’ll have an irate customer, and then I don’t know what happens but I’m sure it’s not good.
I heard (I could be wrong, but I heard) that they are only making about $7-something per order, and it can take an hour and a half to shop and deliver. That is not enough money for all that work. So tip your help generously! And be understanding if it’s not as good as if you had gone to the store yourself.
Of course someone else’s shopping job won’t be perfect. But at least they aren’t bringing you canned salmon destined to be moved back and forth across the country for the next decade!
You know how some people shave their head to show solidarity with their friend or family member who lost their hair from chemo? Well, let me tell you what happened to my poor, shaved poodles.
Poodles don’t have regular dog fur that sheds all the time and stays short. Instead, they have something more like sheep’s wool that doesn’t shed. It keeps right on growing…and growing…so they need regular clipping; about every 6 weeks.
My poodles are typically beautiful after a good grooming:
When we went to Boston for my surgery, we left the poodles with my mother-in-law. After a few weeks I realized the dogs were going to need groomed. I hired a mobile groomer so my mother-in-law didn’t have to take them into a shop. This was right before all the shops were closing due to the virus. The mobile groomer was insanely expensive, more than I’ve ever paid, but I didn’t have a lot of choices and was just grateful to find someone willing to go out there and groom my dogs.
I didn’t even know there was an issue until John got down there to pick them up a couple of days later. He called me and warned me I would just have to laugh about it, otherwise I’d cry. He said he has never seen such a bad grooming job in his life.
Rosie looks like a miniature lab!
Yes, that’s Rosie! I guess she’s still sort of cute, but it’s shocking! She usually looks like this (except not usually with an ocean in the background):
It’s funny that the groomer didn’t even do them the same. She completely shaved Rosie, but then she left some hair on Kai’s head and ears – but it’s cropped way too short. The poor guy looks pretty funny.
You would have thought that if the groomer imagined that she knew what she was doing, she would have at least done them the same. Maybe after completely shaving Rosie she decided she goofed (yeah maybe?) and then tried to google-image what a poodle cut is supposed to look like before starting in on Kai. Colossal fail.
Our third dog, Kira, got lucky and escaped the butcher-groomer entirely. She’s the most timid of our three dogs, so I had told the groomer to do her last. When it got to be her turn, the groomer wouldn’t do her because it turns out she has a wound on her side. We don’t know how she got hurt.
After we got her home to Albuquerque, we cut the matted hair around the abscess, cleaned it and applied ointment. Now she has a cone collar on so she will leave it alone. We have some antibiotics and are hoping we can successfully treat her abscess at home and not have to take her to the vet.
The dogs are like the goldilocks story. One is completely shaved, one half shaved, and one unshaved and in a cone. None of them are “just right”. No matter, we don’t mind, who is going to see us anyway? We’re all in quarantine. It’s backyard ball time!
I kept myself entertained the other day by sifting through my 41,372 pictures looking for good dog pictures from better days. So here’s a few more, enjoy…
I’ve been getting some questions along the line of, “Why chemo, didn’t they get it all?” It’s a bit more complicated than that. Yes, they were able to remove the whole tumor. But surgery disrupts everything in the region and there’s going to be dislodged cancer cells spewing around a bit afterwards. Also the cancer had (just barely) started to spread. It’s not like it’s taken hold all through my body or anything. But it had creeped into one nearby lymph node and had started to set up shop there, which is concerning.
They removed that lymph node during surgery (and a bunch of others just to be on the safe side). I currently have no known tumors or remaining infected lymph nodes, but there’s definitely random cancer cells wandering around and we need them to not get settled down and comfortable. My chemo is basically a mop-up exercise.
After my recent post where I said, “If someone would just send me chemo pills, I would be set!”, a friend of mine gently suggested that chemo is not going to be as easy as someone dropping some pills in the mail. Well, ok, yes, I guess I figured that.
First I need to wait to get out of quarantine (because I traveled home from Boston I’m still in quarantine. The cancer center won’t let me come for an appointment). Then after quarantine I’ll need to do a bunch of blood work and possibly some other tests. And there are specialists to consult. It will all take time.
All this past week I spent waiting to hear back from the doctor. First I was told the doctor would call on Monday, then Tuesday, then Thursday, then Friday…I won’t bore you with the exact details, but it involved repeated calling to various doctors offices, emailing my medical records to anyone willing to give me an email, and being glued to my phone, waiting. It’s surprisingly stressful waiting for a doctor to call.
All week long I’d hand my phone off to John if I needed to run to the restroom or something, so he could answer it for me. And every time I absentmindedly set my phone down somewhere I got frantic. “Were’s my phone?! Where’s my phone!?” We waited and waited and called to check back, and resent records over and over, and checked back again, and finally, on Friday evening, a doctor called!
I don’t have an actual appointment yet, but at least now I have a doctor with a plan. I’m expecting to start chemo in just over a week from now. I’ll be put on a combination of pills and IV injections. I’ll start the pills on the same day as my first IV. Then I do the pills every day for two weeks. Then I take a week off. Then I do another IV and pills for two weeks. So an IV every three weeks, and daily pills for two out of three weeks. This goes on for 12 weeks. That’s only 3 months, which is much shorter than the 6 months we were originally told to expect. So that’s excellent!
During treatment I’ll get my blood drawn frequently so they can check for various things like my white blood cell count. If I seem to be getting too immunocompromised, they can give me things for that. Also she told me that the drugs available for nausea are a lot better than in the past, so I’m hoping I won’t be too miserable.
I will also need to do another MRI, which I think should go fine. I learned a lot last time about how to not get claustrophobic. I’m not sure when I’ll have that scheduled – fairly soon I think, as a post-surgery baseline for comparison to future testing.
As most of you know, my sister Emily is an emergency room doctor. I’ve asked her to keep me updated regarding the challenges at work, and I’m converting her messages into a series of blog posts. This is the second post in the series.
She says:
Our lack of PPE [personal protective equipment] is still shocking me. Previously we would use our N95 masks once and then dispose of them. We are now being required to reuse them for five shifts in a row. We are then storing them in a paper bag with the hopes that if we wait 10 days or so, any virus will be non-viable and we can potentially reuse them again.
They gave us new gowns today. I’m not quite sure what the purpose of them is because they are completely permeable. One of my coworkers misted some cleaning spray on his arm while wearing the gown and it did nothing to block the liquid. I’m pretty sure it’s only so patients think that we are using PPE.
This is excellent, for anyone in the middle generations who grew up listening to Queen and have a love-hate relationship with the Bohemian Rhapsody. (Thanks to Laura for sending it.)
I’m going to try to write this without TMI (over-sharing), but we’re talking about colorectal cancer…
You’ve been patient with me as I’ve ranted about this and that, so you deserve to celebrate with me as I announce that my GI tract has suddenly decided to start working!
I won’t go into details about what “not working” looked like, but it was bad. And the doctors couldn’t give me much reassurance about how much things would improve because everyone’s outcome is different. My tumor wasn’t out in middle of the colon somewhere easy to deal with; it was far too low, far too close to some critical muscles.
And I was making no improvement! There’s nothing more reassuring than slow and steady progress. But there was no progress at all. Weeks passed with absolutely no improvement. It’s been an entire month since my surgery. I was wondering, would I ever have a normal life again?
And then abruptly – it wasn’t gradual at all – just suddenly I’m normal again. It’s all working! Completely and entirely working like nothing ever happened! At first I wondered if it were just a fluke, but it’s been 48 hours now. I’ve been totally, completely, GI normal for TWO DAYS!
That doesn’t mean I won’t have some setbacks, but now I know that normal is possible. I’m not broken forever. I am so grateful.
I want to celebrate by going somewhere, lol, because now I finally can! Except – oh wait – I guess I can’t go anywhere. Dumb coronavirus.
My cancer surgery in Boston was on February 28. We were supposed to get the all-important pathology report by March 9, but because of the coronavirus nothing is working smoothly anymore. We eventually got a verbal report on March 13, and the actual digital copy of the report on March 16. I immediately, within 5 minutes of getting it, emailed my records to my primary care doctor in Albuquerque requesting a referral to an oncologist.
Nothing happened. A few days later we got concerned and started calling every doctor we knew in Albuquerque – John’s primary care doctor, the guy who did my colonoscopy, etc., and we also directly called one of the main cancer centers. Finally, just this Monday (March 23), a nurse from the cancer center calls us and asks for our records, which I sent within 5 minutes of getting off the call. She told us that the doctor would call yesterday, so we monitored my cell phone the whole day. No call.
Then this morning the cancer center called again, and the medical assistant calling thought she had my pathology report – but all she had was the pathology report from the colonoscopy back in January, which apparently the colonoscopy doctor had sent in. She did not have the one from my surgery – she didn’t even know I had surgery! I had sent all the records, but apparently the nurse from Monday hadn’t actually managed to get them into my file or to the doctor.
So 5 minutes after that call, I sent the medical assistant my records. Now, supposedly, a doctor is going to call me tomorrow. We shall see. I’ve been frantically sending my records to everyone who is willing to give me an email. Please just give my records to a doctor – any doctor!
It looks like I’m being assigned to a doctor I actually saw once before. When I first got a low white blood cell count, I was sent to see a hematologist at the cancer center. At the time, we thought I might have lupus, which runs in the family. But then I had the colonoscopy and you know the story. Anyway, turns out the hematologist is also an oncologist. She doesn’t specialize in my exact type of cancer, but I think prescribing chemo is pretty straight forward. Right now I will take whatever doctor I can get.
Meanwhile, because of the coronavirus, I am officially in 2-week quarantine because I was traveling from out of state, and only got home on Saturday. So they won’t schedule an office visit, which is fine with me, I don’t want to go in anyway. Except I need chemo.
Here’s my hope – what I would really love to have happen is the doctor prescribe chemo in pill form. Usually chemo is done intravenously via an IV or a port. But sometimes it can be administered in pill form. If someone would just send me chemo pills, I would be set! I don’t even know if that’s an option for my type of cancer. But I would very much like to stay home and not be going in for a port and/or IVs.
Of course I’m still going to have all the horrible side effects of chemo either way. Chemo is a poison – it targets fast-growing cells. So it kills cancer cells, and unfortunately also kills other normal, needed, fast-growing cells in the body. So the pills wouldn’t be any less miserable, but at least I could be miserable at home.
I know you’ve already all seen too many coronavirus articles and don’t need me posting another. But I’m just so worried about my sister and her family. This is a good but scary article written by an ER doctor just like Emily.
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