Colleen: small steps forward

[mdlbear]

When I went in to see Colleen this morning she was still throwing up, but at least she could move her toes! I spent about 45 minutes just holding her hand and watching her sleep -- she obviously needed it after a bad night. They also switched her from percaset (pills) to morphine (IV), and she was getting IV fluids as well. Thank goodness for the PICC line! She's a lot more comfortable than in any previous hospital visit.

I still don't have a name for what I was feeling. Empathy? Distress? A kind of distress, certainly. Even if there was a feeling-English dictionary it wouldn't help -- I don't speak feeling yet. Any more than I speak feline, though I can at least recognize from context when Colleen's "meow" means "I want to be kissed".

Out on my walk I used up my one remaining phone spoon to call her: she can sit on the edge of the bed now, and was feeling a lot better. Which in turn raised my mood from distressed to a little better than OK. I'll take what I can get.

It was starting to rain again when I headed back to work. We need the water, but I couldn't help thinking it was my parade that was being rained on this week.

Comments

[obsessivewoman.livejournal.com]

Thank goodness Colleen's mobility is improving. Are they going to stop food for while to allow more surgical healing or is there another plan?

[mdlbear]

They already have.

The healing is progressing very well; what's not happening is getting her mobility back and her bowels functioning.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

IANAD, but it really sounds to me as if the epidural lasted a lot longer than it should have, and is taking far too long to wear off. And morphine is notorious for slowing down the gut - they used to use it to treat severe diarrhea - and causing nausea and vomiting.

There's no well-known English word for the emotional distress caused by seeing someone you love in physical and/or emotional distress, and not being able to make it better. Empathy, compassion, and frustration are all part of it, but it's more complex than that.

[mdlbear]

Colleen has an atypically strong reaction to some of the codeine derivatives; we didn't realize until now that the one they use for epidurals was one of them.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

Sounds as if she may be a "poor metabolizer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_reaction_testing)" - I am, and codeine makes me miserable, without doing anything at all for pain. (Roughly 7% of the Caucasian population has a variant of the cytochrome-P450 2D6 enzyme pathway, resulting in reduced ability to metabolize various classes of drugs. The two most prominent drugs this affects are dextromethorphan - a common cough suppressant - and... codeine.)

[mdlbear]

Just spoke to the anesthesiologist again; yes, that's one of the possibilities, along with infection and bruising, though none of those really fits with her current symptoms.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

You'd be surprised how many doctors have never heard of the problem, though. Some years back, I was having assorted dental surgery. The dentist who was doing it actually had three degrees - dentistry, dental surgery, and anesthesiology. He even said that he "likes to play around with" giving his patients different combinations of drugs - every time he operated on me, it was different. But for post-operative pain, he was going to give me a prescription for codeine, until I told him I couldn't take it. (There are also people who are genuinely allergic to the stuff.) He had never heard of the 2D6 business until I told him. So he'd switch me back and forth between Percocet and Vicodin. (Interesting side note: only a few of the semi-synthetic opioids are metabolized by the 2D6 pathway, and besides codeine, another one is Darvon. I had to tell the dentist about one also.)