Terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day

Talk about adding insult to injury!!

The biopsy happened this morning. The procedure itself went well, afterward was not so good. Steve did not come out of anesthesia easily and when he did he was in horrible pain. They quickly gave him pain meds only to give him something else to reverse the narcotics when he became non responsive and not breathing. By the time he returned to his room he was in unbearable pain. He was left alone in his room to suffer like that. I immediately found his nurse and informed her this situation was unacceptable and something needed to be done now. She was reviewing his chart and said the only thing she was authorized to give was a small dose of fentanyl. Steve has been wearing a fentanyl patch so has already built a tolerance so I knew this would not help much. Obviously their concern was his breathing, I understand that and agree. But you cannot breathe anyway if you are in that kind of pain.

I told the nurse to give him the med and after that I wanted him moved back to the step down unit {they moved him to a telemetry room, quite far from the nurse and a higher patient/nurse ratio} and put back on the bi-pap and medicated! They said that if he has the pain meds he might have to be intubated...my response was "good, then he'll be getting oxygen and pain management! Yes I do get that being on a respirator is a very big deal but they just took him off one for surgery and they could put him back on one for what was looking to be a very serious situation.

At that point the nurse had the nurse manager come in and talk with us about our options while the nurse called the doctor. He did explain that where Steve was really was not much different from the step-down unit except in step-down it was 3-1 and telemetry it's 4-1 and her other 3 patients were stable. This felt ok so then we moved on to pain relief. Just then the nurse came back and said doctor put him back on his previous pain meds and she had in her hand a dose of fentanyl, dilaudid and percocet. Within minutes Steve was drifting off. He did start to go pretty deep and his oxygen levels were dropping. My agreed upon job was to sit there and wake him enough to remind him to take deep breaths. I had to do that a lot.

Somewhere around 3pm he was able to get a little more comfortable and stopped thinking he was about to die. He asked me at one point to go get all the kids so he could say goodbye. I'm glad I didn't listen to that request! They gave him about 10 pillows and we spent the next few hours adjusting and re-adjusting pillows, trying to get comfortable. By the time I left at 11:30 he was finally medicated enough that he was able to sleep and was breathing well. Oh..and no chest tube! No idea why as I did not get to speak to the surgeon. He has a large hole on the left side of his chest and two smaller ones on his back. His entire chest cavity hurts.

So we have probably a day and a half now to get word on the biopsy. I did research a little on the net today and learned that UCSF treats over 200 types of Interstitial Lung Disease. There is a chance the biopsy won't yield any answers and if that's the case it looks like UCSF is the place to go. We'll cross that bridge when/if we get there. Right now Steve just needs to recover from this current crisis and come home to his family who misses him fiercely.