Sometimes good news creeps upon you almost unnoticed but finally I got some good medical news after a stressful summer. Last week was somewhat eventful and actually started out with what appeared to be some more apparent medical problems. Fortunately the situation rapidly improved.

The week started out poorly with my pancreatic drain tube plugging up yet once again. Instead of the pancreatic fluid produced by the remnants of my pancreas draining out of the tube inserted into my back into a drain bag this caused the fluid to pool into an internal abscess in my abdomen where it proceeded to continue digesting my internal organs at the abscess boundary. I got the usual symptoms (back pain, difficulty breathing, inability to eat, frequent throwing up, etc.) which I have experienced many times previously.

In addition I have secondary progressive multiple sclerosis and was in the midst of an attack that left me very weak and vulnerable. Add to that the excessive (for me) heat which seems to debilitate many MS suffers like me and you get a prescription for a miserable time.

After that start things just had to get better and luckily they did. The turn around started at midweek when I got another ultrasound to inspect the blood clot in my arm. The clot was gone!!!! They looked again and again and each result was the same. The blood thinners I was taking did their job and eliminated the clot. At the doctor’s consultation yesterday the situation had improved to the point where I no longer needed to take any more blood thinning medicine. Hurray, I can remove another set of pills.

Next I got a CT scan which produced my usual allergic reaction to the contrast dye (I’ve had maybe 75-100 CT scans and its only been in the last dozen or so that I’ve had an allergic reaction). As these reactions go this one was mild so that was good. After the CT scan I had the procedure to replace the drain tube.

It was the tube replacement that really improved the week. My old tube hadn’t really plugged up. What had happened was that the drain track from the abscess to the tube had closed up so that no more fluid was getting to the tube. When the tube was replaced they managed to insert it into directly the middle of the abscess. This necessitated punching through about a half inch of tissue from the old drain track into the abscess. The fluid immediately started draining about 125 cc of fluid a day and I felt much better.

Even more encouraging the CT scan indicates that my ascites seems to be gone so we started having serious discussions with the surgeons about an operation that could fix this problem once and for all. Nothing can be done immediately because we have to be sure everything has stabilized but if this drain tube lasts several months then (hopefully) the next step will be to fix some of these problems so that I only have to deal with my MS.

In addition my MS attack seems to be subsiding so I’m able to resume some physical therapy. In fact a bunch of physical burdens have been lifted from me this week. I kind of feel like the guy who hit himself on the head with a hammer because it felt so good when he quit.

Whew, some post! I have a headache now so I think I’ll quit and lay down for awhile.

Tags: medical update, Multiple Sclerosis

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 at 10:25 am and is filed under Grandpa Oddball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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