Post-Biopsy Suffering - April 7, 2010

For this blog posting, I am starting at midnight, the night of the 7th. 60-120 minutes is all I slept due to post-Biopsy pain...

The nurse gave me pain medication at 10:30pm the night before, but its effect was gone by midnight. I asked her to give me more, but she was not allowed. They have a certain protocol they need to follow. My eyes were drifting away due to the sleeping pill, but my pain was too strong to allow me to fall asleep.

She injected me with a dose of morphine. I must add that I do not like the feeling of a liquid going into my blood and body through the IV. It's so cold and just weird. The morphine is somewhat of a deceiver as it kicks in fast and gives quick relief, but is very short lived. The first dose lasted till 1:30am, and then it went downhill from there.

I called the nurse again, and she was only able to give me the pain medication at this point. I had to wait 2 hours for every dose of morphine and 3 hours for every pain medication. I didn't want to wait another half hour for morphine and decided to take the pain medication immediately.

At 4am, after having taken 2 pain medications, 3 doses of morphine and exhausted all my options, my soul was screaming and I was getting paranoid about the tumor invading some organs....So I called my parents, woke them up and asked them to call my uncle in London. Every other physician in Houston that we know was sleeping, and I was curious about what my uncle had to say. He's a NeuroSurgeon in the UK. He relieved me by telling me a tumor takes weeks to invade an organ, and that the tumor was probably only applying pressure on the organs. As long as I wasn't going to die that night, I was ok. At times, the pain made that belief imminent.

I was also told all this pain came about due to the biopsy: moving and touching the tumor isn't by any means a relieving process for the body...

I ended up having 5 doses of morphine that night and 3 pain medications....They really helped, but by the time I had my 5th dose of morphine, its effect only lasted 25 minutes.

One interesting observation I want to make is that the nurse would wait for me to drink my sleeping pill, my pain medication etc...or for the full dose of morphine to go into my IV before leaving the room. They don't even trust the patient with these prescriptions. It's not like Im going to collect them and go sell them on the black market for a few dollars, in exchange for horrific pain...

During the day, and specifically during the morning time, about 20 different St. Luke's employees knock and come in our room to do various things. It gets annoying really fast although they're only helping out. Whether it's the person who brings the food, changes the trash bag, changes the bed sheets, cleans the bathroom, picks up the food trays, drops off the food menu, or the nurse who wants to check my blood pressure etc...It's ongoing, and one cannot rest or fall asleep for more than 15 minutes at a time.

The Oncologist team came by at 10am. As soon as they walked in, my heart started beating a bit faster; Im not sure this was Adrenaline Rush though, lol. I had expectations of talking to one Oncologist, not 3. We had just spoken to 2 doctors a few minutes earlier. The more doctors in my room, the more dangerous the news. They told us that the Biopsy was not ready yet. We were anxious to know what my tumor was all about. The Oncologists told us they're almost certain it's a malignant tumor but that the Pathologists were doing more studies on the samples to determine exactly what breed the tumor belonged to.

My family and I got a bad vibe about their news. We knew deep down it wasn't going to be a benign tumor. We shared this with my brother Basil, who got on the next flight from DC and came to stay with us for 5 days. I really appreciated him coming so fast...It was awesome to have him around.

My family and I stayed around the hospital room the whole day. More visitors came by that night (7) and we decided towards the end, to take a walk around the hospital...It was fun :D

After saying bye to our friends, Joanne and I go to McDonald's to pick up some Iced Coffee. Every time I order one of these drinks, I forget whether I prefer the Vanilla or the Hazelnut flavor...Does this ever happen to anyone else? It sucks, lol.
But It was fun to walk around with my toolkit. This trip was the only good thing about the IV.

Having a McDonald's in a hospital is a debate I will leave for another time....Think of patients being taken care of all day, only to find out they sneak out to Mickey D's and do more damage to their health. How ironic.

After picking up the drink, a security person stopped me thinking I was running away from the hospital with my IV. lol. Apparently many patients attempt this.

My brother's flight landed at 9pm and he spent the night with me in the hospital. It turned out to be one of my best sleeping nights. I also can't complain when I get brother bonding time. It's precious. We talk about everything and anything. I confide in him like no other.

Sleeping time: 6 hours.