Friday's Review

Finally, a quiet day.  Tiffany has spent most of the day sleeping -- her nurse has been great and has kept people out and grouped all of his things together to allow Tiffany maximum sleeping time. Last night was a short night with many interruptions so sleep today was greatly needed. A quiet day in the hospital is a good day which usually means no new problems and no new treatments and that is basically the case for us today. They are adding one IV drug to her regimen to help address the colitis but that is all.

It was neat today to run into a couple of the folks who helped take care of Tiffany the last hospital stay. The lady who cleaned her room last time came by to visit and then I talked with a nurse aide in the hallway for awhile. Tiffany sure does make an impact on the people with whom she interacts!

Below is another letter that I wrote to friends and family giving them an update on where Tiffany is with her health.  It should give you an idea of exactly where she is -- I had meant to post it earlier but alas it did not happen. Looking forward to a quiet and uneventful weekend. DH

Dear Family and Friends

Well, what a week it has been! Tiffany has proven to keep the doctors guessing with plenty of theories and not much success at knowing exactly what is happening until the last couple days and even then some things we don’t know. Initially when we came in it was for things going on with her abdomen, hands/feet, and throat with some difficulty with breathing and a fever. At first they thought that it was all connected but now it appears that it is not connected and they found more issues in the testing process. In the past week I think Tiffany has had more tests than what she would care to go through again but that is all part of the process when you are not sure what is going on with your body. I think the most doctors we had in one day was 8 and most days we see 5-7 of them.  Yesterday, we had 5 all in the room at the same time. So the short of it is that Tiffany has . . .

1. C-Diff and Colitis (explains the abdomen problem) which is easily treated with antibiotics although it has progressed quite a ways
2. Perhaps candida in her throat (We have yet to get the final test results, but this is what they are treating)
3. Toxin release in her hands and feet from probably all the drugs she has been on over the year (this is simply a theory as they don’t know for sure what it is -- it is the same symptoms as reaction to chemotherapy which she hasn’t had last time I checked)
4. The new one that we were not anticipating is that she has MRSA in her blood. This complicates everything because MRSA likes to go to foreign objects and grow on them and then they go to the heart.  She had a TEE (this is where you swallow a camera and they look at the heart from the inside) on Sunday which ruled out MRSA colony on her heart valves. What it does mean though is that her port has to come out which is a big bummer.  She will then go through the treatment process over four weeks and then hopefully get another port put back in when her blood is clear of the MRSA. They will remove it Thursday.
5. Her breathing has become more difficult and her oxygen has had to be increased. They believe this is a result of the stress that her body is under as her lungs “sound” good.

The good news now is that we have a treatment plan and we are currently staying with that plan.  Last week it seemed like they were changing directions every day and had a new thought of what the problems may be.  One of the blessings in all of this is that we were able to catch the MRSA in the blood early on.  This actually can be a very serious problem and she wasn’t even showing signs of it when we came in to the hospital. God is good and is working in ways that we do not know!

Thank you for your continued prayer. If you would like, you can send a note to Tiffany and I know that would be an encouragement to her. Here is how you can specifically pray now.

1. That the treatment plan would continue to bring healing.
2. That we can get the MRSA totally out of the blood.
3. That we would be able to reschedule at UCLA for a reasonable time (looking for the beginning of January)
4. That we could get out of the hospital before Thanksgiving (possible but probably not likely at this point but God can intervene!)
5. The Lord is opening some doors of conversations with some of the medical staff -- pray that God would use us in their lives and that they would turn to the Great Healer

Thank you again for your love, support, and prayer.

Trusting in His Grace,
David and Tiffany Brock