Saturday. To OMG or not to OMG.

Trying so hard to be brief. <---That sentence just made it longer. <---So did that one.

Bill is feeling really good, relatively speaking. Just a bit of nausea, fatigue, mouth pain, but all manageable. Next appointment is this week, Wed. I think, to get the red devil again. He still has his hair.

Only thing is that I looked at his blood test results printout from a couple of days ago. I've researched this till I'm cross-eyed, but have not found any page that does not agree with this statement: If your Blood Urea Nitrogen (BUN) to creatinine ratio gets higher than 20, you are in "prerenal azotemia" which means stage 1 of kidney failure.

Bill's ratio is 22.2!

Technical terms you can skip if you want: his baseline blood test with family Dr. showed elevated BUN 23, when the limit is 18. Two weeks later, after one red devil, his BUN jumped to 32, where the limit on that test was 21. His creatinine stayed at 1.4. For the BUN to jump and the creatinine to stay the same is worse than if both went up.

So I go to the online calculator to get his ratio using his test results. His ratio with the family Dr. was high, but within the limits, definitely under 20.

But now his BUN : creatinine ratio is 22.2:1, and EVERY MEDICAL JOURNAL I've read says that above 20, you are in prerenal azotemia and you have 24 HOURS BEFORE NECROSIS SETS IN AND YOU LOSE A KIDNEY OR go into total kidney failure.

Ok. I know a google degree in medicine is worthless. But where do I err in those facts? Bill said that TO HIS KNOWLEDGE the Oncologist DID NOT LOOK AT HIS BLOOD TEST RESULTS, and they sent him home. The nurses only looked to see if he needed magnesium, he thought. I wasn't there. Or she looked and didn't notice this? Or she looked and thought it was ok? The latter is my hope: that somehow you're SUPPOSED to go into pre-kidney failure and receive no treatment, and that we're safe, and the entire internet is wrong.

Even though my reading tells me this is a dire emergency and that right this minute, he should be in ICU with people working on him to save his kidneys. Yes. The pages I read said ICU. And 24 hours.

But what do I know?

Bill refuses to read about it, let me discuss it with him, or call a doctor.

So here we sit in a standoff, with me wringing my hands and Bill refusing to THINK about it. He had to take a valium when I just mentioned it!

The carpet beetle drama continues but, yes, pales in comparison to the above. I am a nervous wreck. But Bill is online shopping for golf balls as we speak.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?