We headed to the doctor's office for blood work before being admitted to the hospital. We got there for our 10:30 a.m. appointment which was really supposed to be at 9:30 a.m. No worries...they still got his blood work done. Everything looks good but white blood cell counts are higher than normal range.
We went to hospital admissions and got Jimmy all "checked-in" for his stay and then he went to get his PICC line put in. They started the procedure and at the last minute, an intern wanted to do the procedure instead of Mike, who normally does it. Since this is a teaching hospital, Mike could not say no to the intern. At the time, Jimmy didn't know that he had a choice to say no either. The intern had no clue what he was doing. Normally, it would take Mike one shot of lidocaine and then about 4 minutes to complete the procedure. The intern gave him 5 shots of lidocaine and when he put the tube in the artery he kept pulling it back and forth and it was really painful for Jimmy. Finally, Jimmy asked for him to stop because it was so painful. I was waiting in his room for him and when he came in, he was really angry and his arm was really sore. Here's a picture of the PICC line...you can see where it is already started to bruise on the bottom.
By this time it is 2:30 p.m. and we are waiting for the chemo to get started. We are informed that the chemo order was entered into the hospital "system" under the wrong admission number, therefore, they cannot administer it to him. Dr. Beach (I know, a great name, right?) resubmitted the order but...you guessed it...another problem and had to be reordered yet again. This went on for hours. Jimmy finally got his chemo started around 9 p.m. and it ended about 1 a.m. This was a very long and stressful day.
Welcome to chemo treatment.
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