Day 4 = Saturday = beginning of HepC treatment week 17

Isn’t it amazing that whatever you are going to do, you enjoy it more after a decent night’s sleep? Again last night we were almost completely uninterrupted for most of 6 hours – a long time in the hospital world where drawing blood, doing EKG’s, and checking on everything else knows no night or day.

As normal, the day began with a big headache – everyone knows that’s the standard Saturday since Tami has been doing the interferon injections on Friday nights. So Tylenol at about 6 helped and oxycodone about 9:30 took some of the edge off. The headache continued worse through the day until they increased the oxycodone, when Tami finally got some good sleep. Unfortunately, that wasn’t until about 6:30 p.m., so the day had been very long. The nausea also bothered her as normal, but she thought it would be tolerable without any drugs. Well, actually, no. Unfortunately, she had vomiting about 9:00, but that was followed immediately by an iv injection to prevent any more. Little late calling for that one… Well, now she is resting somewhat again, has had more pain meds, and has had her normal evening pills, including the 5th of her new drug Tikosyn, the one to treat (and hopefully help to prevent) the a-fib. So that would be a good end to the story except that we still have an injection, and EKG, and another pill before we are done for the night at about 12:30 a.m., I’m guessing.

Otherwise, today was pretty uneventful and without much news. The doctor explained more about the cardioversion, how long it lasts, how often it may need to be re-done, etc. The big thing, I guess, is that if all goes according to plan, we should be home on Tuesday. Tami will be this doctor’s 5th patient in the last week for this regimen of Tikosyn/cardioversion, and she expects this one to be successful as the first 4. They changed their minds a couple of times about how they are going to keep Tami anti-coagulated (her blood “thinned”) before Monday – hence the new 2-a-day injections in her stomach (no fun), but that’s a detail, not really new or important information.

Obviously, we are hoping for a better day tomorrow, so we’ll see how the night is and where we are and how Tami is feeling after that. More about hepatitis treatments and less about heart stuff, but that’s normally what Saturdays have been about for us for the last 17 Saturdays. 7 to go…