A Pleasant Hospital Visit!

Yeah! Today's PICC line insertion went fairly well. There's always risks with these things I guess, and the biggest seems to be infection, but the benefits outweigh the risks. This is apparently the best way to adminster the amount of chemo that Dave will be getting. The nurse said that the chemo meds are very corrosive on veins and actually causes them to collapse very quickly, so this line distributes the meds safely through the veins directly into the chest cavity where the blood flow is greatest and there's no damage. Also he won't need to get any more needles to draw blood as they can do this through the PICC line as well. (Dave HATES needles so reducing the amount of needles he will need is a good thing!)

A VON nurse is supposed to come tomorrow to change the PICC line dressing. After the incident with the removal of the feeding tube sutures, I called this morning to ensure that only a nurse that is familiar with PICC lines come out. (Live and learn.)

While we were at St. Joe's this afternoon, Dave stopped to visit a friend that recently had a baby. This little boy was born prematurely and at just 1 lb wasn't expected to live more than 12 hours. That was 5 weeks ago, and he's 10 lbs now and almost ready to leave NICU to go to the Children's Hospital, and then home! We're constantly encouraged with stories like this. We also ran into an old friend that's a nurse there who gave us some tips. AND the IV nurse that was assisting in the procedure today got talking to Dave (and then me) and asked why he was getting the PICC line in. She couldn't believe he had Esophageal Cancer and said he looked great. She also said that her husband was diagnosed in 1982 with bowel cancer, was told that he was too far along, that it was untreatable even with chemo at the time, and sent him home to die. They found a place in the states that uses diet alone build up your immune system to treat it and he's still alive today! She gave me some information that I'm going to look into - www.creativehealthinstitute.com. (I still don't understand why the doctors' and even the hospital nutritionists don't think this is important. All they seem to care about is calories and keeping the weight up but they don't seem to care how you do it.)

Here's the interesting part, we weren't even supposed to go to St. Joe's. A different nurse today mentioned that they were just doing a favour to the Cancer Clinic by fitting Dave in, and that they don't normally do PICC lines for Cancer Clinic patients. We were very encouraged by our total hospital visit this afternoon. Funny, but we no longer believe in coincidence!

Keep prayin'!
Val