Home at last

She can’t resist. (Photo by BobbaLew.)

The other day (Thursday, June 2, 2011) I brought my wife home from Strong Hospital in Rochester.
She had been discharged.
My wife has cancer, but supposedly it’s not fatal.
It’s treatable.
Actually, she has two cancers: -a) Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, and -b) metastatic breast-cancer.
The Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma appeared about three years ago as a hard tumor in her abdomen.
That was poofed with chemotherapy.
The metastatic breast-cancer did not have a primary site; it never appeared in her breasts.
It was first noticed in her bones, where breast-cancer metastasizes.
We knocked that back with Femara®, the trade-name for Letrozole.
Femara is an estrogen inhibitor. Her breast-cancer was estrogen-positive.
Her breast-cancer just about disappeared.
Her stay at Strong lasted over a week, and was her second hospital admittance.
It was her fifth visit to a hospital in over a month.
Everything started at Thompson Hospital in nearby Canandaigua, visits to their Emergency-Room.
The first four Emergency-Room visits were initiated by us, and the first two she received two two-unit blood transfusions to combat anemia and extreme weakness.
Her cancer was restricting urine-flow from her kidneys through her ureter-tubes to her bladder. —It was her ureter-tubes that were restricted, but her kidneys were swelling.
Her cancer was out-of-control growth of the lymph nodes in her abdomen.
The cancer was also restricting blood return from her legs, so her legs were swelling.
Our third ER visit to Thompson it was determined a blood transfusion wasn’t necessary.
Our fourth visit she was admitted the first time, and three units of blood were transfused.
It was also determined her so-called “electric-lights” (her 95-year-old mother’s mispronunciation of “electrolytes”) were a mess, and her calcium up.
Fluid was administered intravenously, which increased her leg swelling.
The fifth visit was per doctor’s orders, after a home blood-test by Visiting Nurse Service indicated low red blood-cell count; anemia.
That was a Sunday.
So began her long hospital stay.
I called her breast-cancer doctor at Strong myself, indicating it was me because my wife couldn’t.
“I have to hope she lasts the night,” I said.
“That bad, huh?” said the breast-cancer doctor, a bit stunned.
“Well, I’m biased, or course, but I think so,” I said.
The breast-cancer doctor thereafter called my wife at Thompson, who had her cellphone.
The doctor got the same halting speech I was hearing.
All-of-a-sudden, ACTION!
The action we’d been trying to get for months.
My wife would be transferred back to Strong, where she had her first cancer treatments three years ago.
It took almost two days for a bed to open up at Strong, so she was transferred by ambulance Tuesday May 24.
Ureter-tube stents would be inserted immediately.
Stents are expandable stainless-steel reinforcements — they would open up her ureter-tubes.
And they managed to do both; no outside drains to a bag.
Strong also administered fluids, so she swelled up like an elephant.
On the other hand, waist up she had lost weight.
Waist up she looked like an Auschwitz survivor.
And all-of-a-sudden the silly Three Stooges movie ended.
“Not my cancer,” the lymphoma doctor would say. “Is too,” the breast-cancer doctor said. “Is not, and furthermore I’m your boss now.” (The lymphoma doctor had become a head-honcho at Wilmot [“will-MOTT;” as in the applesauce].)
All-of-a-sudden the team reassembled; no more two teams versus each other.
The lymphoma doctor weighed back in; treat for lymphoma, despite his original thinking it wasn’t lymphoma.
“I felt like you abandoned me,” my wife told him through tears.
“And my husband is afraid of talking to you, for fear of blowing up.”
So they kicked her out — “I’m finally taking her home,” I thought to myself through tears as we motored out of patient-discharge.
We thought she was being released prematurely at first.
But I know how it is, having had a stroke 17 years ago.
A hospital makes you an invalid; when I was in the hospital, I was taken everywhere in a wheelchair.
At home the wheelchair got parked.
“I’ll get around somehow.”
And so with her.
She’ll manage somehow, and at home ya do.
The next day (yesterday, Friday, June 3, 2011) after being discharged, we had to visit Strong again, to set up outpatient chemotherapy infusions — her first was as inpatient.
The lymphoma doctor strode in; he wasn’t scheduled.
I kept to myself — no blowups.
No comments about the Three Stooges or pulling rank.
“What I hear is the person I married,” I said. “One week ago she wasn’t that way.”
What I’d say, and didn’t, was: “If we learn anything from this experience, it’s that just because we seem inordinately healthy for age-67, doesn’t mean we are........”

• “Strong Hospital” is one of three large hospitals in the Rochester area. It’s in southeastern Rochester. Its cancer-center is “Wilmot Cancer-center.”
• “Canandaigua” (“cannan-DAY-gwuh”) is a small city nearby where we live in Western NY. The city is also within a rural town called “Canandaigua.” The name is Indian, and means “Chosen Spot.” It’s about 15 miles away. Thompson is the hospital in Canandaigua. —We live in the small rural town of West Bloomfield, southeast of Rochester.