Sudden and unpredictable death from a deadly bleedout of my portal vein. That’s the unexpected prospect that I now apparently face. I’ve tried to keep my medical reports upbeat. In fact attached is the start of an initial draft of this medical update but I guess I have to be a little more serious this time around. Here’s the current situation:

Right after New Years I started getting intermittent fevers. Often my temperature would be normal in the morning then spike up to as high as 103 degrees in the afternoon. I had trouble eating and was losing strength and weight. We went to the doctor and urgent care four times over the next six weeks but they couldn’t find the cause in spite of the numerous blood tests, urine tests, xrays and CT scans.

One set of tests would find an urinary tract infection and that would be treated. My fevers would disappear for a few days but then return. Then the blood tests would find an infection which would be treated but soon the fevers would return. Finally they thought they had found the problem. I had a hard to detect blood infection.

In order to cure the infection I needed a four week course of antibiotic infusions three times a day. After several failed attempts to insert a PIC line in my arms (my arm veins have become become hardened and spasmodic from the numerous previous treatments) they finally managed to insert a line through my neck (coincidently also on the third try). Since we don’t have the resources to infuse the antibiotics at home I was admitted to a nursing home for the duration of the treatment which is where I am composing this update.

Finally, we thought, the problem had been solved and after this treatment I could go home in better health free of these fevers. It turns out we were wrong! In a surprising and shocking turn of events we found the actual cause of the fevers and the cause turns out to be life threatening.

The revelation started a few days after arriving at the nursing home. My fevers had subsided and I had a routine appointment to have my pancreatic drain checked at interventional radiology. All went as normal (I’d been through this maybe 50-100 before) until they injected the contrast dye to check the tube placement. Suddenly the surgeon left the room to consult other doctors.

I’m a little hazy on first hand knowledge of the subsequent events since I was quickly pumped full of drugs as they worked on me but from the reports I got from grandma Oddball and the doctors here’s what happened.

While injecting the contrast dye the surgeon was shocked to see that the portal vein was breached and the dye was pouring into the vein. This was the source of my infections but the infections turned out to be a minor problem. The vein itself had been compromised and was in danger of what was termed a “bleedout”. If that happens then I would suddenly just internally bleed to death. Such a bleedout is unpredictable and could happen at any moment (perhaps even while I am composing this report).

I guess I was out for several hours as they worked to minimize the danger. When I woke up I started getting reports on what happened but didn’t fully realize the consequences until some time later (partly due to the fact that I was suffering an allergic reaction to the dye used in the CT scan and had dangerously low blood pressure). I won’t go into detail. Suffice it to say that the bleedout could happen at any time and every day, every hour, every minute, indeed every second I now live until a solution is found is an unexpected bonus.

To summarize I feel much better and am getting stronger every day. I have a few more weeks where I am confined to the nursing home before I can be released to go home. Unfortunately how I feel is irrelevant. A sudden bleedout and death could happen at any time.

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