Jeff was diagnosed with a very rare Kidney disease called Wegeners Vasculitis about 9 years ago. The disease progressed and he ended up being put on dialysis 3 days a week. Many people don't know what dialysis is. He goes on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and sits for about 4 hours in a chair while a machine filters his blood. His blood is slowly filtered out, goes into a filter, cleanses it, and then it slowly is put back into his body. This procedure leaves him very tired, drained and heading straight to bed when he gets home. Usually, he feels better the next day but not always.
Jeff was fortunate to have a kidney transplant in April 06. The transplant lasted only a little over a year before he rejected the kidney and went back on dialysis. Usually, the kidney would just shrink in size and stay in his body. In his case, the transplanted kidney was sucking the life out of him. 6 months after rejecting the kidney the kidney had to be removed. After removing the kidney the worst kinds of infection took over his body. He was treated with high power IV antibiotics to try and get this infection under control. The infection was making him very ill and the antibiotics were not successful in getting this disease under control. After the kidney was removed is where our adventure begins. Jeff would go into the hospital and stay a week or 10 days, often having to have a surgical procedure to clean out the infection. Zap him with antibiotics and send him home. If we lasted 2 days at home before calling another ambulance we were doing good. Jeff spent months in the hospital. At one point during his illness, he only weighed 104 pounds and he looked like a skeleton. There were a few times that he coded while in the hospital and at times there was a big question if he was going to make it. At times being there almost 4 months before going home only to have to call another ambulance within days, This routine of in and out of the hospital living in a 911 mode went on for over a year and half before the infection ate a whole in the femoural artery. In doing a femoural artery by-pass they finally found the infection and were successful in cutting out the infection. Finally, the infection was gone and we thought we had blue skys ahead. Jeff was out of the hospital for over 4 months when he came down with pnemonia. This was the start of a new adventure. The hospital was doing a procedure that was suppose to drain the pnemonia. Instead of draining it, they punctured his lung causing him to start drowning in his own blood. Within less than an hour he was in the operating room doing emergency surgery. He came out of that surgery, not breathing on his own and he had chest tubes to drain any remaining blood from his lungs. The recovery from the lung puncture was a difficult one but he eventually recovered. During his recovery from the lung puncture Barbie (Jeffs sister) wanted to move back to AZ as she hated Houston so Jeff and mom said lets go as we too did not like Houston. So Jeff moved to Chandler, AZ with his mom. His sister Barbie, her husband Quinton, and Barbie's two boys Jordan and Jared. Oh, lets not forget Max, Zoe and Roscoe as they moved too. AZ is beautiful and it was most certainly a refreshing place to be. This was the start of a brand new life. A great new adventure in a beautiful place. Jeff had to have one more surgery on his by-pass as the arteries were narrowing. So, shortly after arriving in AZ the surgery was done and we thought we were in the clear and ready to begin this new life. Instead he started having new problems. Jeff started coughing up blood which started the hospitalization all over again. One brilliant dr. released him from the hospital while still coughing up blood, only to have him admitted to another hospital less than a week later. A few days after being admitted this time, Jeff coded and they were having a hard time keeping him breathing so they had to intubate him again. As the day progressed all odds were against him surviving. Family was called and the wait and see began. Jeff was now losing blood as fast as they put it in him, it was draining out. He had an extremely low platlet count and if they had to do surgery he would not have survived. He needed time and the more time that he had before they had to do surgery the better it would be for him. He was kept intubated and the lung Dr's had to put a dual tube down into his lungs so that blood from one lung would not destroy the other lung. Besides being intubated and lung tubes, he also had a feeding tube, heart rate monitors, and all the bells and whistles that could go on a patient. A little over a week after being put on the intubation, surgery was performed. His right lung was stuck to the chest wall. It had to be carefully removed from the chest wall and the lower right lobe of his lung was removed. It appears that this is all a result of the lung punture in Houston. The recovery from this has been very slow going and not without hurdles to jump. A few months ago, Jeff started throwing up blood. He threw up and threw up blood and once again the Chandler Fire Dept. was at my house transporting him to the hospital. Within a few days, he was transported from Gilbert, AZ to Tucson, AZ medical center. He was in Tucson for a little over a month only to be released from there on a Thursday and was admitted back to the hospital in Gilbert exactly one week later with Bronchitis. Currently, Jeff home and is on mega doses of steroids. The steroids are really starting to cause him some problems. He looks like a chipmunk and his face is so swollen it looks like he is about to pop. He feels awful on these steroids and he is doing his best to control his emotions, and angers that the steroids brings out in him. Last night we spent the night and early morning once again in the emergency room. He was sent home and told to call his pulmonary Dr's in the morning to see if they can start tapering him off those steroids. The question remains, if they taper him off the steroids will the hemoraging in the lungs begin again?
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