On edge this week...

Ron is not feeling too great today. Not bad - just not good. He's feeling sad for what he's done to "me" and the changes that are about to take place. More on that later...

We had a nice weekend with our friends. It didn't start out too great but it ended nicely.

Ron had a couple of appointments in the morning and the original plan was to hit the road after his second one (noon, in Wichita). Ron fell (again) the day before and his new knee was very painful so we needed him to have an x-ray before we could decide if it was OK for him to travel or not. So, while he was seeing Dr. A anyway, we asked if they would take some x-rays of his knee to make sure that everything still looked good. The appointment took even longer than I had anticipated so we ended up having to cancel the second appointment because we couldn't get to Wichita before noon.

I finally got things packed and the car loaded by about 12:30 (a bit behind my original goal but not too bad). I needed to get my oil changed but couldn't find anyplace to get it done. Down the road we go and still needed to get some lunch. Finally, after a stop at Sonic we're ready to hit the road. Time now... 1:30 but that's OK - no biggie. I knew we'd get there a bit after dark but still a comfortable drive.

Fast forward two hours and Ron is teasing me about when was I going to have a bathroom stop. All of a sudden, I had this totally sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. I had packed our toiletry bag and left the whole thing on the stove. Sick, sick, sick. If it was just my medicine, I could go a couple of days without it but I knew that Ron could not go two days without his, especially since he takes so many different things. So, we turned around and headed home. I called Amy and even though she had to wait until Isaiah's bus dropped him off, she said she could pick up the bag and drive to meet us. She ended up saving us about an hour, so that did help. If I had been forced to go all the way home, I would have just stayed there and started out Saturday morning instead.

We ended up arriving at our destination at 10:00 PM instead of the planned 5:30 or 6:00 PM. All we did was fall into bed. Ron drove about three hours, so that did help (he drove back from where we turned around and back again toward our destination).  Our friends were late getting there, too so it was a comedy of errors all around.

Saturday, we spent some time walking around the outlet mall. I bought a new wallet (mine was shot) and got Anna a cute little Santa hat and bib. We finally met up with our friends in time to grab lunch before we headed to see The Miracle of Christmas (free tickets, compliments of our friends' friend). We were going to drive around and look at the "festival of lights" but instead of being a "per car" charge (like we'd been told), it was a "per person" charge and was $10 EACH!. We decided that $40 to drive through 2.5 miles of lights just wasn't a good idea. Too much money. It might have been different if the money was going to charity, but it was not. Even then, I'm not sure that we would have wanted to pay $20 per couple to see light displays when we had been planning on paying $7.50 per couple (we were told it was $15 per car). Oh well... no problem.

We headed back home yesterday afternoon and got here about 5:30 PM. It was a nice, relaxing weekend after all and one that we needed.

Our lives are fixing to take a change and one that we're not sure about.

In Dr. A's office, he brought up the results from the hospital tests - the CT of his chest and the echocardiogram. He said the echo looked pretty good and there were no surprises. The CT showed a portion of his liver and Dr. A was concerned about it. He wasn't Ron's doctor last year when he was hospitalized with the increased aluminum (December 2010 hospitalization) and it's not something that I thought about when Ron changed primary care physicians. I don't know how much the liver disease has increased, but Dr. A is concerned.

He told Ron that his chest CT showed cirrhosis in his liver and he wants him to have further testing. He's scheduled Wednesday for an abdominal and pelvic CT with IV and barium. Ron doesn't drink and has never had more than the occasional (very few and far between) beer, so he asked Dr. A what could cause the cirrhosis. Dr. A said there were several things, including medications and liver cancer. I looked online to see what else I could find (I didn't want any surprises) and discovered quite a bit that I'm not too thrilled about.

Ron has several symptoms of cirrhosis that I would not have connected if Dr. A hadn't brought it to my attention. Bruising, fatigue, and loss of appetite are things that he's been dealing with for the past few months and although they could mean nothing, they can also mean the cirrhosis has progressed beyond "mild" and is now more severe. Dr. A says the test results will be back by the 20th and he'll know more then.

Until then, I think we're going to be on pins and needles. We've talked a little about it and Ron says that he doesn't think he wants to take any treatment. It might extend his life but he's not sure he can handle being so sick from the drugs used in the treatment.

For me, I'm just going to do what I can to make life a comfortable for him as possible.