Reasonable Paranoia

I think Q may be the only person who really understands when I ask the question: Have you ever wondered what would happen if he never came home?

That's where I am right now. It's very dark here.

We came in to the E.R. early Saturday when Mr. B dropped under 120 pounds. They immediately put him on morphine to treat the intense stomach pain he was having, and he's been continuously on it since that point. We were operating under the theory that maybe his system was so shot at that point that he couldn't even digest his pills, so that's why they weren't working.

They upped his vancomycin and added flagyl to the mix. They started giving him his prednisone via i.v. Today he had another round of tests and procedures, and then the results came back that the medications weren't working. He's been put on a liquid diet, which I'm sure his parents are going to #%$^ up shortly, because Mr. B's father is sure he knows better than the doctors. (Last week on Friday, he gave my husband energy gel packs under the premise that they were packed with nutrition and would help bulk him up. For anyone who is an idiot and doesn't read the ingredients and warning on energy supplements, you should NEVER give a hypertonic solution to a dehydrated person who then proceeds to eat it without drinking anything--it results in extreme stomach and intestinal upset, and apparently expedites a trip to the ER. That's what the doctor said when I asked, anyways.)

Tomorrow they are going to start him on Remicade, which will essentially freeze out his immune system. They have to stop his body from attacking itself, and the only way to do that is to remove all immune response to everything. So if he catches a cold, it could kill him, because his body will be incapable of fighting back.

As I said, this is a very dark place. We wash our hands a lot here.

I am behind at work and school, and my house is a god awful mess. I'm sleeping at the hospital every night because I have this feeling in the pit of my stomach that if I get used to leaving him at the hospital he might never come home. I try to reason myself out of this, but the analytic part of my brain looks at this and says we've had nothing but bad news so far. This could very easily turn to a situation where Mr. B needs major abdominal surgery to take out his colon, and if that happens, I am terrified of him going into surgery with a BMI of 15. That's not good.

I need people to please stop bringing food. We have enough food--the problem is not that Mr. B doesn't have food. The problem is that he can't eat it, and if he can, he can't digest it. I can live with my messy house, and my crappy grades, and even losing my job, if I have to. What I need is a miracle.

Alula