HALP! BILL NOT CHEEZBURGER!

This picture above gives you an idea of how our BillyBoy felt by the end of this day.

The number of things that happened to him in just one day--it was enough pummeling, poking, beeping, bleeding, stitching, sticking, and rolling around to turn even the bravest cowboy into nothing more than a mushy cheezeburger!

But he doesn't WANT to be a cheezeburger! HALP!

And don't say "cheeseburger" where he can hear it, or he will throw up again!

Here's a quick summary of his terrible, horrible, no-good day:

1. Breakfast: Throwing up after one bite of soup.

2. All-day nausea requiring two medicines to control it. He sipped only one-half a cup of water in the entire day, he was so queasy.

3. Abdominal pain that only continuous morphine shots would manage.

4. Spreading pinkness on his abdomen, around his incision.

5. Pink lines going up both arms from his IV sites, either reactions to his intravenous antibiotics, or possibly inflamed veins. BOTH IV sites had to be re-done. Felt great. Not.

6. Blood starting to leak out of his main incision. Never happened before.

7. Dragging himself down the hall, hanging on to his walker for dear life, and looking down and seeing blood pouring onto the floor.

8. So much blood pouring out of a hole in his side (where they removed a drainage tube perhaps a little too soon) that when he stood up from a chair, an entire sheet lining the chair was sopping with blood, the cushion under the sheet was totally blood-soaked and had to be thrown in the trash, blood was running down the chair, and dripping on the floor. And when he sat on his bed to get his chair cleaned up, the blood soaked his whole bed pad, sheets, and gown in 5 minutes.

Eventually a doctor had to be paged to come in and give him a set of stitches on his side to stop the blood pouring out of the hole where his drainage tube was--but they only did this after all the preceding blood incidents and after his sheets were changed about four times today from becoming blood-soaked.

Oh, yeah, and the stitches? No pain injections. Just IN went the needle.

9. Potassium level won't come up. Having to take horse-sized potassium pills by mouth in addition to intravenous potassium.

10. So much commotion that he finally went into a state of complete anxiety (I did, too!) and he had to have medication to calm down, but the pharmacy took two hours to deliver it.

11. Can't get control of his blood pressure: starting medical treatment for it.

12. Heartbeat up around 100 again, even while he is sleeping. (Should be near 60 or 70).

Good news: They're not sending him home like this. Oh, heavens, if I had to take care of him alone in this condition, I'd be checking myself into the Duke mental unit. And they don't even HAVE a Duke mental unit! And I wouldn't care!

Thank you all for your loving, supportive, understanding, beautiful emails to us. I usually read them to Bill, but I can only get his attention when he is awake, which is NEVER, except when he simply cannot sleep because he's getting turned into a cheeseburger by the endless stream of pummeling dramas that are ever-unfolding in his poor little room.

Pray for him, because, HALP! HE NOT CHEEZBURGER!