Father in Law has taken a turn for the worse. He’s still in hospital as they can’t sort out the fluid and blood pressure etc. I had a couple of emergency texts from MIL last night as the Drs had rung her in the afternoon with an update.
Long story short-ish, I left work early to go and pick MIL up and take her to the hospital, the fact that she wanted to get there so quickly un-nerved me, as she's not always as concerned as we would like, but hey ho. We saw the Dr when we were there, and quite perversely the cancer is the least of FIL’s worries. He has so many things wrong with him, poor old boy – heart failure, cancer, kidney failure, water retention, clot on his lung, as well as some other stuff. They now can’t treat any of them, because as soon as they do it makes one of the other conditions worse.
His kidneys are failing, which is why his blood pressure was dropping way back at the beginning when he first went into hospital this time, before the ulcer burst. Basically, years and years of medication, especially the water tablets, have damaged his kidneys. The intravenous water tablets they were giving him this time to try to disburse the fluid had a reaction with his kidneys and his blood pressure kept dropping again, so they can’t do that. Because his heart is failing and getting worse all the time, the fluid retention is getting worse. His stomach last night was awful, the skin was stretched beyond anything I’ve ever seen before and he was just lying on his side resting it on the bed, it’s much bigger than any weight he has ever carried. He’s gained about 1.5 stones in fluid in little over a week, even though they drained 4kg off him.
So the Dr was very honest, at FIL's request, and they are now into palliative care, ie making him as comfortable as they can until the inevitable.
They are doing some blood tests, for which the results will be back today, to see if they can do another drain on him, but again, only in the interest of making him more comfortable. If the tests come back that his blood won’t clot, they’ll give him some vitamin K and try again. If his blood is clotting okay, then they’ll do another drain for him.
But, he has a clot on his lung that they can’t treat too, so if that moves it could be much sooner than we think even now.
We asked the Dr bluntly but they won’t give any sort of indication yet. I had a quite word with her afterwards and I asked outright if she thought a month was optimistic and the impression she gave me was that it was. I think we’ll have him for more than just days, but I think we’re talking weeks rather than months.
Quite what this will mean for everything else that is planned (chief bridesmaid at BF's wedding, visit to my sister overseas) at the moment I have no idea. I shall worry about that when it comes to it.
xx