Archive for January, 2006
Major Bump on Road to Lina’s Recovery
Dear family & friends,
Sorry for the bulk-like e-mail but I’m running on empty.
Lina’s last chemotherapy ended in late October. In November they told us Lina was in complete remission. “Break out the champagne but save the good stuff until we make it 2 years with no reoccurrence,” they said. She was back at work and her hair was growing back.
Lina had been having lots of back pain for the past few weeks — which our primary care doc, who our HMO requires us to go through for everything, said was a muscle pull/pinched nerve caused by a fall on our icy driveway and so all she prescribed was physical therapy. The pain kept getting worse - to the point where Lina couldn’t sleep, even with heavy medication. So… after the doc wouldn’t return our phone calls for a week we demand that she order an MRI to find out what was going on. So last Tuesday Lina went to ME Medical for the MRI - and when they finish they tell her only to “get to our emergency room fast.” She calls me - then we wait in line for over 5 hours - with Lina in intense pain - just to see some emergency room doc at midnight who knows nothing and actually asks us why we are there.
Bottom-line: They page her oncologist and want to admit her, we tell Maine Medical Center ‘Fuck You’ and get her admitted into Mercy Hospital instead at 2am Wednesday, they do lots of tests and tell me the base of her spine is covered with a fast-growing lymphoma tumor which is seriously messing with all the nerves to her lower body and paralysis or worse is imminent if they don’t stop the growth of the tumor. Wednesday-Friday she was in rough shape with such intense pain that the maximum morphine dosage they could give her wasn’t even enough. And her systems were all going into shut down mode so she’s hooked up to lots of machines. But, now they have her on a morphine pump and the pain is finally under control. At midnight Friday they started a new round of chemotherapy that gets into the spinal/brain system but takes 11 hours to administer - she’ll have it done every 2 weeks indefinitely. Tomorrow they’ll do radiation if the tumor hasn’t responded to the chemo yet. The oncologist says once they’ve got her stabilized they want to move her to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston for a ’stem cell transplant’.
My girls and I broke hospital rules tonight and decorated her walls with lots of family art. Lina was doing much better spirit-wise and saying she’s ready to fight back and beat it.
So it goes…
Love,
craig
