Monday, January 16, 2017

Monday and no Exercise Day

There will be no exercises today because it is Martin Luther King Day.

I slept really well last night. I woke up two times but went right back to sleep. I slept until 6:00. It has been years since I slept until 6:00.

Missy and I have both had our breakfasts and I am just catching up on the blog and will download some photos soon that I took yesterday at the MLK service.

This is a photo of the keynote speaker, Her name is Delice Downing and she is the Director of Student Life as well as the volleyball coach at Coffeyville Community College. She had a heartrending story of her journey at "Living the Dream".

These are the three sixth grade winners of the essay contest. The theme was "What the Martin Luther King Day Means to Me". Each approached that theme in a different way and they were required to read their essays to the congregation. The tall boy on the right, DeAndre Shobe, won $25. for his. The middle girl, Kendall Vest, won 75. for hers and the winner...on the left, Anna Elliott won $100. for hers. The woman behind the mike is Karlas Moore, one of  the 6th grade teachers at Community Elementary School in Coffeyville.

I don't know what I will do today. I could go to the market and get the small amount of groceries I need. We will have leftover spaghetti for lunch. I have some more garlic bread and we will have that too. I cooked beans yesterday and I will leave some of those for Bob for Wednesday when I have my surgery. I have corn bread mix to have with them. He may have them both Wednesday and Thursday because I won't be released from the hospital until Thursday some time.

I hope this surgery works. I am not all that impressed with the medical community. My first bad experience was when I went to a specialist to have my second bunion surgery done and it failed. He said my only other option was to have the Keller procedure done. I checked into that and learned that procedure fails 70% of the time.  Of course I chose to just live with the bunion.

Secondly, the doctors were not able to diagnose my Bob's problem until a week before he died. The surgeon our doctor sent us to to get the biopsy did not want to do the biopsy since Bob also had type 2 diabetes. Then he lied to our doctor and said we did not want the biopsy. That's why we went to see him. That's what the appointment was all about. I told our doctor that he had lied to her. Then we went to Bartlesville to a radiologist who scanned Bob's chest and immediately said "Well, this is cancer but we won't know what kind until the biopsy comes back". He then did a needle biopsy. Why Dr. Lynn didn't do that is beyond me. We went home and our doctor called in hospice when she got the results of the biopsy.

Bob had developed lymphadema in his left arm in the fall of 2009. It swelled terribly and was painful. We went up to the hospital and a nurse explained the procedure for wearing a sleeve to compress it.  He had multiple MRIs and CT scans but nothing was detected. There seemed not to be a clue that there might be some reason for all that swelling. He had not had breast surgery..the usual reason for all that swelling.  So he dealt with that until May of 2010 when he died. 

When I had the erysipelas on my face, they had it diagnosed as cellulitis and gave me an antibiotic that did not clear it up. That was the first week in February of 2012. It was March before I finally went to Dr. Eslicker, a Bartlesville dermatologist, and got it correctly diagnosed.  He told me it could have been fatal since the infection was so near my brain.

So, I am not all that impressed with the medical community. I hope Dr. Peaster doesn't disappoint me.  I wouldn't have the surgery here in Coffeyville. Dr. Lynn would be assisting Dr. Howerter and I wouldn't take my cat to a liar.

More later....

I looked up the showtimes for the movie I wanted to see. Bob was here at the time but he showed no interest if going so after he left, I called and asked Karan. She wanted to go so we went to Bartlesville where the movie was showing at 1:40 and watched it. It was  "Hidden Figures" and it was excellent. It was a movie about the brilliant black women who worked on the space program. I highly recommend it! No one would ever have known about their contributions if the book by the same name hadn't made such a hit that they made a movie about it. It was certainly never mentioned in history.

Bob came back over at 5:00 and we went over to Brahms and had an ice cream cone. Then we came back to my apartment and watched the CBS news. He went home shortly before 7:00 and I took my bath and watched TV with Missy lying on the sofa until I couldn't keep my eyes open any longer. Then we went to bed.

3 comments:

Galla Creek said...

Good luck with the surgery. Maybe this Dr. will not disappoint you.

susie @ persimmon moon cottage said...

I hope that you have found an excellent doctor and that everything will go well with your upcoming surgery.

Our family had some medical "stuff" happen in November. My husband's father was diagnosed as having had a stroke. He had a lot of confusion but could still speak, swallow, and talk. That hospital then put him into their Rehab Facility. He didn't show improvement at the Rehab, so they recommended that he go into a nursing home. My husband, and his sisters looked and found the best nursing home they could for him, considering all of the ins and outs of paying for it, patient to care giver ratio, etc. It was so sad, of course my father in law wanted to go back to his own apartment, but we were told that his condition would probably stay the same, and long term round the clock nursing care for an extended time would have been unaffordable. In the nursing home he seemed to be rapidly declining, even though family members were there every day for several hours. Then he lost the ability to swallow or feed himself. He then contracted C Diff. which led to rapid decline. He was then sent from the nursing home to a different hospital than the first one. The second hospital did a scan and it showed that he had a brain tumor, not a stroke, and it apparently was growing rapidly. The first hospital had not diagnosed a brain tumor at all. My husband and his sisters asked that an MRI also be done at the second hospital just to be sure, and it showed the brain tumor, no sign of stroke .

If only the first hospital had diagnosed that rapidly growing brain tumor, it would have qualified him for hospice/comfort care in the beginning and it could have been with visiting nurses and home care and family in his own apartment where he had longed to return to. And he would not have been exposed to that horrible Clostridium Difficile (C Diff) and the suffering sickness that caused. My husband's father died in the last week of November and his funeral service was Dec 3.

My husband and his sisters needed to take a step back for a few weeks, but soon they are going to start looking for some answers as to what was going on with the diagnosis from the first hospital. How had there been such a discrepancy in diagnosis? How did they miss seeing the brain tumor.

I don't know what is going on with Medical Care in general these days. I do know it is scary.

Margie's Musings said...

Yes, it is. They are perhaps overworked and too quick to make a diagnoses....or the wrong diagnosis. I am so sorry for your terrible experience.