Down the rabbit hole... (and on to the home stretch)

10 am Saturday

Mom has had an eventful last 12 hours!

First the good news:

• She is doing 100% better than last cycle at this time
• She's doing relatively well in general
• She and I and her physician all agreed that we would be most comfortable if she spends one more night here and then comes to our house tomorrow. And unless something new pops up (or digestively things keep getting worse/don't get better) there's no reason why she shouldn't be able to do that.

Then the less great news:

• Her digestive woes were back with a vengeance yesterday afternoon/evening/night. They put her on a total intake freeze (no water, no ice chips, no nothing) for 12 hours to give her system a chance to rest/recover which seems to have helped. Now she's slowly starting to eat things again though she's restricted to a pretty bland diet. We'll see if that goes well or if everything blows up again

Then the 'exciting' news (not bad...just 'different')

• Mom took an Ambien to try and sleep last night as she hadn't slept at all the last 2-3 days. Well....that ended up being interesting. One of the normal side effects of IL-2 is kidney and liver function shutting down (at least partially). Because of this her body isn't able to metabolize or get rid of drugs the way it normally would. Plus in general her electrolytes etc aren't normal so I'm sure it's reacting differently anyway.
  
  Anyway...after a comedy of errors/miserable episode in the middle of the night that resulted in a CNA being fired (or resulted from a CNA being fired mid-shift....i'm unclear on that) she took the drug and fell asleep to vivid bizarre dreams. In part of them (around 4 am) she was leading a group of school kids down the hall with all of them in their hospital gowns and pushing IV poles and then approached a shadowy nurse figure to say hi. She started telling the nurse "I don't belong here. I should be home." at which point the nurse looked up and said "Oh my gosh Molly! No, you belong here. You're not going home til tomorrow. Let me help you back to bed!
  
  So yep. Mom had a jail break last night. Either her bed hadn't been re-alarmed after all the craziness (most likely) or somehow they didn't hear the bed alarm (less likely) but she was in fact wandering the halls in the middle of the night. Luckily/thankfully she didn't fall and nothing happened and she was fine. But a) I think it probably led to some re-training of folks here and b) was definitely part of the decision to keep her overnight one more night. The last thing we need with her sleeping at the top of our steep stairs is sleepwalking.
  
  

So in general today she's swinging between being completely lucid and then being fuzzy/out of it/narcoleptic from a combo of the sleep deprivation and there being left-over drugs not yet cleared out of her system.

We'll keep all posted if anything changes but in general we plan for her to be back at our house by the afternoon.

Becca