Transferred to PSL

Kristan was transferred to Presbyterian St. Luke's (PSL) long-term acute care facility this afternoon. They have a big job ahead of them, tending the wound, and getting her to eat, so her body can fight. On the good news front, Mandy got to visit tonight. — with Kristan Attardi Hushing at Presbyterian/St. Luke's Medical Center Denver.

Not making progress

She's eating a little more, but not enough. We've been agonizing and arguing over the sudden announcement that they will discharge her today unexpectedly, because she's not making progress. I think they've decided to give us some time to prepare, by sending her home tomorrow after dialysis. No idea how to ensure she gets good care at home. At least she'll be rid of the man across the hall, in the netted cage in his bed, who yells "help" every two seconds, all day and night.

Ate a little

She was in much better spirits this morning before dialysis. Although she still wasn't eating much. Dialysis tired her out. And so did the pain meds. But she perked up again, to eat a little Thanksgiving dinner -- turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cranberry -- that our friend Jen sent over from the dinner she made today. — with Kristan Attardi Hushing at Swedish Medical Center.

Thanksgiving Day walk

You know the dog is having a good walk, when you have to go around the park twice, three bags aren't enough, and you have to move on to using seedpods to pick up stuff.

Better night

The RN this morning says Kristan had a much better night, slept well, didn't report any pain.

Struggling to be hopeful

Her pressure sore is really bad. Found out today, Wound Care wanted her admitted, so she can get stronger for a debridement surgery they want to do. Regular wound care is ineffective at this point. So the lack of wound care this past week becomes a little less maddening, with that information. But she hasn't been able to eat, so she's just wasting away instead. She did eat a little fruit and drank some Nepro just now -- a small victory.

About the same

No caregiver with her this morning, but since she's in dialysis, I thought I'd take my walk. How is she? Not a simple answer. She has been sleeping through the nights in the hospital, which feels like a miracle. She is very dopey whenever I visit. She complains that they are overmedicating her, but I think it's the sleeping pill they give her, which probably doesn't metabolize out as quickly, because her kidneys don't work. The neck CT scan showed no significant change in the past few months since the last scan. My guess is that the increased neck pain is caused by her sleeping in a bad position. She tends to lean her head over at an exaggerated angle, when no one is helping her to avoid that. The pressure sore seems worse than last week. Her leg sores don't seem any worse. One of her hands has really bad deep scabs on all of the knuckles, probably because she scraped her hand doing something. They are so deep and hard, that they must be causing her immense pain. That's getting much better, since I started putting tons of moisturizing lotion on both hands, several times during each visit. The bowel control problems have significantly reduced, since she stopped taking the chemo med for the CML. Unfortunately, the trade-off is that her white cell count is going through the roof. An Oncology doc stopped by yesterday, and mentioned that he saw blasts in the smears, which is generally bad, but might be mitigated by the fact that the WBC is very high because she's (temporarily) off that med. He said the medication for CML is very targeted, and should not adversely affect wound healing. So she should consider restarting that soon. Sorry if that's TMI for some, but I know others will appreciate knowing some of these details.

K at Swedish Hospital

They sent Kristan to Swedish ER from her wound care appointment on Wednesday. Several issues. She was admitted to room 4117B. 

iPhone woes

Very bummed that my mobile phone has gone offline. Won't boot either of the possible ways I know. When I push the power button, the little "I'm booting" logo shows up for 40 seconds, then the screen goes black again. Feels like something is very broken. Looks like I'll be taking a trip to the store tomorrow. In the meantime, I won't be reachable by texting or calling that phone. I've been pretty reliant on that device for communication, and health and financial data collection and analysis, among many of the other capabilities of the 350+ apps I have on there, so it feels like quite a loss. And just a *touch* of freedom...

Update Nov 3 - Could Murphy be on my side today?? The Apple online guy just told me through their Chat support facility, "your iPhone is still covered under AppleCare+ for another 3 days so any warranty repairs will be free and any accidental damage will be $49 for repair!" so I'm actually looking forward to my Genius Bar appointment tonight. — feeling hopeful.

Monday evening - Hooray, functional again! Very strange. They said the hardware was fine. They loaded new low level firmware to get it going.

I asked if one of the recent iOS updates caused this -- 8.0, 8.0.1, 8,0.2, or the latest 8.1, and they didn't think so. They said they've seen this phenomenon occasionally, and don't know what triggers it. No charge for the fix, though, which was nice...

Update Nov 4 - The last unrecoverable aspect of this, is the loss of the past week's app data, which would've been saved, if Sunday's backup had worked, instead of having the problem show up then. Everything from photos to financial records that changed since last weekend. Oh well, in the overall scheme of things, it's nowhere near as bad as it could've been, if I hadn't been doing regular weekend backups.

Update Nov 7 - After a dozen crashes and reboots since Monday's "repair", Apple replaced my phone. They ran diagnostics which indicated the Springboard App (the one behind everything) was having memory errors, and were going to reload the firmware again, but I talked them into replacing the phone instead. They advised me not to restore from backup, because of the risk of pulling a corrupted app back onto the phone. I mean, really? I have years of medical data I've been tracking in some of those apps. I am really bummed now.

Update Nov 9 - I couldn't stand it. I had convinced myself that memory errors had to be caused by hardware, so I bit the bullet, and restored from backup anyway. So far, so good...