One Year Later: Nov 29, 2023

One year ago today was the biggest turning point in my families lives!

No matter what combination of drugs we gave Jami she could not make the pain and nausea go away. We have now been up for days with her puking nearly every hour. (Interesting fact: Over the past 24 hours, I clocked over 9000 steps walking in the house to care for Jami). Jami can’t take it anymore and I called hospice again to see what we can do. They recommended we come into their facility in order to better administer drugs to get her pain and nausea under control. When you are at home we can only use oral drugs which take time to metabolize and get into the blood stream, when you are at a facility they are going to inject them into a vein which has nearly instant results and makes it easier to quickly determine what is working and what does not.

Jami agreed to go into hospice. I didn’t think she would, one of our main goals of hospice is so she could avoid these hospitals which she hated being in so much.

Side note here… The hospice facility in the STL area is NOT a hospital!!! You need to understand that! This place is a HOSPICE HOUSE, if you don’t know much about hospice and hospice houses, you should spend a few minutes reading out them. Here is more information: https://www.bjchospice.org/evelyns-house - this place is AMAZING. The people are AMAZING. The doctors, staff, and volunteers are AMAZING. I can’t say enough good things about hospice and hospice house. Seriously, read about it and donate if you can.

…back to our story… She agreed to go to Evelyns Hospice House, this tells you how uncomfortable she was. The nurses went right to work, they knew their primary objective before we arrived. Reduce the pain right away so she can be comfortable. Then work on a pain management strategy going forward. First problem, two nurses tried to access the port no luck. She’s never been able to access a vein without an ultrasound staff to find and guide them. To accomplish objective #1, they put an IV in the upper arm right under the fat. I didn’t know this was even a possibility, but it worked. They first inject morphine and an anti-nausea medicine. While Jami still had a head-ache, this combination of drugs knocked her out so that she could sleep. A few hours later another nurse was able to access the port and get it working. All subsequent drugs went in the port.

Jami’s was able to sleep all day. She may wake up for a few minutes, say a few words then fall right back asleep. Many times she would fall asleep while talking with me or the nurse, mid conversation. I didn’t care. She was sleeping. This is all I cared about. On a normal day she gets at least 10 to 12+ hours of sleep. These past 2 days, I bet we only got a couple of hours over 2 days. She needed the rest. I needed the rest.

Let’s close today’s post on a happy note. She was finally comfortable. She was sleeping. She was at peace.