Sandi Tuesday Evening--Eight Days In The Hospital

Tonight marks Sandi's eighth night in the hospital and she is a very unhappy and frustrated patient. She desperately wants to come home and might get her wish tomorrow. The news is most definitely mixed at this point.

On the good news front--they stopped the additional antibiotics this morning and have removed her IV line. She is off the oxygen totally for short stretches of time and at others she is on a reduced flow. When off, as long as she does not get up and move around and stays seated in the chair, she maintains around 93 on their sensors for as long as an hour at a time. This is a huge improvement. It also appears that the fluid has thinned out and dissipated from her lungs.

On the bad news front---there are at least six and quite possibly more dark spots in the back of both lungs. A doctor specializing in "advanced lung cancer and infectious diseases" has been brought in to take samples from her lungs of these black spots. Tomorrow morning, around 10 am, they intend to have her fully sedated and then he will run some sort of gizmo down her throat and into each lung. Once in the lung he will take samples of  several of these dark spots. In addition to testing them for cancer, they will be tested for various infectious diseases and other things. He does not believe they are cancerous from looking at her previous scans and x-rays, but feels these things are a significant concern and have to be checked out. Once the samples are obtained it will be several days, at the earliest, before we have any idea what the results are.

And, yes, stem cell transplant patients are at risk of lung cancer and with her history she is at far higher risk than other stem cell transplant patients from what we have been told in the past. However, this is not something we should have had to worry about now as this was more of an issue, in theory, one year and more out from the transplant date. She should not be developing lung cancer now and the idea that this could have happened is too hideous to contemplate.

Sandi is taking the news very well. She is convinced these spots will turn out to be nothing and she will be just fine. She is taking it far, far better than I am tonight.  I am stunned beyond belief and very upset. All I can do is hope that she didn't go through everything she has gone through these past months only to have cancer come roaring back in a new form already.