Back In The Hospital

All things considered, Joy had a reasonable day yesterday with excercise rehab and came home very exhausted, but as expected.

We awoke about 5' ish this morning with Joy experiencing extreme shortness of breath and difficulty breathing. We put her on O2 starting with 2 lpm and eventually increased that to 6 lpm when she de-saturated to 71%. She was somewhat stable then began an episode of considerable coughing (which is good) but this really took her breath away to the point she just couldn't breathe. Just as I was going to call 911, she began to slow down and I paged the Transplant Team and they suggested I bring her to the clinic for examination immediately. She was scheduled for an appointment tomorrow. They checked her over and quickly determined they must re-admit her but that the wait would be long today since the hospital was at 100% capacity. We arrived at the clinic about 11' ish and she got to her room at 7:30 PM tonight. Both of us are a little tired. I waited until they got the necessary histories, vitals, on-call physician visit, etc. and headed home for a little rest.

Very scary morning, for both of us.

Something that some of you that know Joy really well and know her love for Duke will be surprised, maybe shocked to learn that she hates the place and wishes she never heard of lung transplant. I could agree with her on the second part or at least for now. This is a very, very tough surgical process. But if we had not had it done and she didn't survive the year, then the decision would have been questionable. We continue to place her survival in the hands of the Duke Transplant Team and believe this problem can be fixed but selfishly, we want that accomplished sooner and without so much pain and discomfort. We saw one of our "new" lung transplant friends leaving today for home-home and his surgery was May 1st and he got along fairly well with only two re-admits for rejection.

My guess is that Joy has severe rejection despite the bunny medicine and the chemo IV she has taken. Bronc tomorrow (don't know if it will be biopsy--hope so) and some more tests, meds and stabilization. She has lost another 16 lbs since surgery on top of the weight she had to lose pre-transplant and is looking pretty good. Now, if she only felt that way.

Long day, good night.