The Revolving Door

So yeah. 

Sunday evening, sister called from her friend's house about 45 minutes south of here to let me know she was back from their "vacation" to the beach, she hadn't been able to keep anything down since Tuesday and her car had a flat tire that wouldn't reinflate and also there was apparently no spare.

So I went down to fetch her and take her straight to the ER that's about an hour north of where we live.

It's a good thing I like to drive.

I don't like driving as much when the person in the passenger seat is vomiting. Especially as I'm a sympathetic vomiter. So picture, if you will, zooming up 95, windows down to air out the smell, heater on full blast to try and keep everyone from freezing as it was somewhere around 20 degrees outside, trying not to hurl because of the noises and smells from beside you.

Good times. Good times.

Five hours in the ER later, she was admitted and I headed home.

Monday, they decide she needs stents in her kidneys as this all appears to be related to kidney damage/blockage (possibly from her radiation treatment, but who really knows) and it's backing up and filling her stomach with bile. Que the vomit.

They also decide that if they can stabilize her and get her to a point where she can eat, they can send her home and do the surgery next week. So that's the plan.

Tuesday, I head up to grab her and take her home around 3. (After the snow and ice and all that joy - but the main roads were basically fine and our littler roads weren't terrible.) Which hospitals being hospitals, actually meant I got home around 9pm.

Yesterday? Yesterday I was taking her back to the ER at noon. Because while she'd managed 24 hours of no vomit and keeping food down there, she made it almost to midnight before it started again when she was home.

So now they've decided the stents actually are an emergency, so they'll squeeze her into today's surgical schedule. Which means, if all goes well, I should be toting her home again tomorrow evening.

Of course stents being what they are, she'll have to lather/rinse/repeat the surgery every 3-4 months from now until eternity (which given the cancer, is at least not all that far off. Hush. The dark humor helps me cope.) She's not excited about it. She didn't want to do the stents, honestly, but I convinced her that dying b/c of kidney failure in this particular method wasn't going to be a painless and easy way to go.

Not that cancer is a lot better, but at least with that there's hospice and good drugs so you can sleep til you die.

Or so runs the theory. 

(And maybe they'd do that with the kidney failure route too, but honestly? Why risk it with what is essentially an easy "surgery" that doesn't have any incisions involved?)

So yeah. How's your week been?