More hallucinations, more fluid

I think I have writer's block tonight. I have about a thousand thoughts running through my head and I'm having trouble putting any of them into words. Here goes nothing... It was really hard seeing Dave yesterday (emotionally one of my worst days). It reminded me a lot of his first days in the ICU. He was not very lucid and for the first time he looked very small and very frail in the hospital bed. He's still having vivid sleep deprivation and drug-induced dreams and then has trouble separating his dreams from reality. He's had a couple different dreams where bad things are happening to the kids and then he's relieved when I assure him that the kids are accounted for and are ok. I usually feel very strong, but I couldn't stop crying when I walked out of his room yesterday.

Quite frankly, I just couldn't face going to the hospital first thing this morning, so I ran some errands and spent a bit of time at the library. I also bought an electric razor for Dave since the hair on his face was starting to outgrow the hair on his head. Thankfully, he was more tuned in to reality when I was there today. I brought some cards people had sent over the past couple days and he was happy to have me read those to him. I'll continue to bring him copies of the posts people leave on the blog as he always likes to hear those as well.

I had a long conversation with the surgeon this evening. The drain they inserted on Friday night seems to have done its job and the drainage has really slowed down. However (and this is a big however), there's another fairly sizable pocket of fluid which has accumulated in his abdomen and which is not being relieved by the new drain. They sent him back down to the intervention radiologist to insert yet another drain to get rid of that fluid. Unfortunately, they were not able to get at the bulk of the fluid. The way the surgeon described it to ye ol' layperson after I gave him the "huh, what does that mean?" was to liken the fluid pocket to the segments of a grapefruit. They could perforate one segment and drain it, but the other segments contain discreet pockets of fluid and it's just not practical (not to mention that it was painful for Dave) for them to drain each one individually. The options now are to either wait and see if his body will reabsorb the fluid over time or go back in to his abdomen surgically and drain the whole area. At this point, because his white blood cel count has dropped and his fever is down, leaving them less concerned about possible infection in that fluid, they are taking the conservative "wait and see" approach.

We embarked on this whole adventure with an admittedly aggressive surgeon to aggressively kick the ass of an aggressive cancer, but at this point I'm feeling pretty good with conservative.