C-Diff Strikes Again!

Oh no, Spence is writing...its got to be bad news. Unfortunately I'm the designated writer when Louise is not up to it. And she is down again. What more does she have to go through? Anyway, for those of you who have been following this blog for a while, you will remember that Louise was the sickest when she got C-Diff three other times. Now she has it for a 4Th time. It is a very bad bowel infection that causes horrible diarrhea to strike on the average of about once an hour every hour of the day. All the cramping and nausea that goes with it makes life pretty miserable. You feel like you have extreme flu. You ache. You go hot and cold. Well let me just say that you are as miserable as you can be. How does a person get this plague? Most of the time it is because you have taken an antibiotic that kills the "good" bacteria in your colon and lets bad bacteria get through. People also get it after being in the hospital. However, Louise has been out 2 weeks and she has not had any antibiotic in a long time. I think, in her case, having had it 3 different times in the last 4 months, she just has this bug that never gets completely killed by the antibiotic. When she went into the hospital, she was still supposed to take this antibiotic flagyl, for another week. The surgeon, however cut it off. I can't believe it came back after a whole month of being off the antibiotic.

But come back it did in great force. Friday, at 2am it hit her hard. She has had the diarrhea and other symptoms non-stop since then. I called the surgeon and he said to take Pepto Bismol but if that didn't work we should take her into the ER at Good Sam today (to spend a whole day there for them to tell us it was C-Diff again). Last night she was so bad that I took another route. I called another doctor to kind of get permission to take the Flagyl again because we were pretty sure it was C-Diff. I have a whole bottle of it remaining. I got permission and he agreed I should grind it up and put it in her feeding tube because it can be very hard on the stomach. So I have been giving it to her for 24 hours and we are seeing the same results as before. Tonight she finally feels somewhat better even though the race to the bathroom continues, but not as often. She will have the diarrhea for 2-3 more days but will not feel as sick. And then it will go away after that. We will work with the GI doctor to put her on the only other antibiotic that will kill this disease once and for all.

Today is Kelsey's 18Th birthday and plans had to be changed for celebrating. We were going to go out to a restaurant and have Louise make her first appearance outside of our house and the hospital. But, plan B had to be implemented. Plan B stands for Back to Spence trying to cook a stake dinner for Kelsey and make it similar to a restaurant. I tried anyway.

Louise was also going to try to go to Sacrament Meeting tomorrow, but those plans have changed also. She has taken a few steps backwards. We are trying to hydrate her and get some food down her. She has eaten nothing (not even tube feeding) for 24 hours. Tonight she ate some of my scrumptious dinner so let's hope she can gain back some of those lost pounds soon.

Yesterday, between paudy trips, we went to the dietitian to get advice on how Louise can get more calories into her body by the time they take out the feeding tube in two weeks. We then went to the oncologist for the first time in two months. He examined Louise and felt like everything from a cancer standpoint looked in order. He was thrilled with the results of the surgery and the clean pathology reports on the extracted esophagus and the 6 lymph nodes taken out. He did warn us that the cancer could come back. For this reason he wants to examine Louise once a month for the next 6 months. He feels like if something does come back and it is caught early that there is much that can be done to fight it.

So there you have it. I'm sorry that you have to put up with my report one more time but Louise should soon be back at the keyboard, hopefully feeling much better.

Spence