#caretakinaintforsissies

It ain’t!  I spent some time cleaning out my bathroom cabinets this afternoon.   I took a pic on my phone… but apparently it didn’t save…b/c that’s my life.  What I found brought me back to my care taking days.  The plethora of supplies that were pushed to the back of the cabinet.  Gloves, masks, ExLax (did I mention I’m baking brownies), Imodium, Fiber pills (because you never know which way things will go), Eucerin, among others.   It reminded me that I still had this picture on my phone from way back when.   I can still remember the days where I had all those pills and doses basically memorized.  Pill boxes were filled once a week, usually on the days that we had clinic visit, just in case something changed.   I promise its a pain in the ass to fish out the one tiny little Tacro (that autocorrected to taco) pill out of that box!  I other news, there’s definitely a “Wednesday” case somewhere around here, or perhaps someone got a bonus when they got one of our old cars.

Just managing medications was a job in itself.  My first trip to Walgreens, on the day that John started treatment, was a doozy!  I had to pick up only one prescription, prednisone.  Yep, the first treatment had a prednisone taper after every infusion.  “take on day 3, 4 5” or something like that.  They also gave a list of over the counter medications, which made me feel like a lunatic.  Tylenol, because you shouldn’t take ibuprofen with chemo.  Imodium AND ExLax, because you seriously never know which way things will go.  Just a few things to have on hand, just in case.

I still remember the time when I went to Walgreens to pick up Lasix, since John’s legs may have been bigger than the tree trunk in my front yard.   They wanted to give me Potassium pills.  (If you have never had these, they are legit horse pills!). I thought, hmmmm, that doesn’t seem right, so I called the clinic.   Our fave nurse shouts, “DO NOT GET THAT!”  “I swear I’m not trying to kill Johnny!”  Followed by ” Thank God you pay attention!”   They had talked about monitoring his potassium while he was on Lasix…not prescribing it.  Crazy enough, when he was admitted to the hospital the final time, his potassium was super high because the yahoos at the nursing home didn’t know enough to stop the potassium when he stopped the Lasix.  Don’t worry,  they had to do every possible thing to get it to come down….um, bring on the ExLax.

He was getting pretty shaky at one point, and I knew he needed his Tacro level checked.   UofC had been keeping him under 8.   It was TWENTY TWO!  Tacro was basically a drug to keep his body from rejecting the transplanted cells.  Of course the nursing home wouldn’t take my word that he needed to adjust his dose.   I called Dr B direct on the bat phone.   He was on vacation, but put a call into Dr G’s cell, and then called me back to give the phone to the nurse to discontinue the med.  I may or may not have just had him ditch the pill in the meantime…..

I really don’t know how he has been gone for a year and a half already.  It seems like just yesterday that I was managing all these medications.  While I’m glad I don’t have to keep track of all of that anymore, I would do it again in a heartbeat!  Medications was just a small part of the journey, an important part, but just one piece of the puzzle.  (NOT the superhero puzzle… that one almost broke us!)