Lifesavers for Latasha

And here we go again. Today started pretty well, full of wonder and excitement, but ended with frustration and disappointment.

From a transplant perspective, everything is going great. Latasha’s labs, X-rays, lung spirometry, and progress are all great. We reviewed everything with our clinical transplant coordinator and were told we could head home. We’d start the next phase of the journey with home care and get into our lab and medication routine in the comfort of our own home.

Then, in walks the doctor. She concurred that everything looked great from a transplant perspective. But… the big but, Tasha’s stomach issues are, in her opinion, now emergent because she has lost so much weight and cannot maintain a reasonable caloric intake to keep nutritional levels healthy and not have extreme nausea and vomiting.

Without getting into my frustrations and unfavorable opinions of this topic, here we are on Day 79, getting admitted back into the hospital. Yes, you read that correctly.

The current care plan is to put a feeding tube in and consult the thoracic and gastrointestinal teams to see what the next steps are. Our emotions are raw and filled with anger, frustration, and disappointment for many reasons, none of which are constructive talk about here.

As I sit here typing this, I have been waiting for 5 hours for Tasha to get her bronchoscopy and lung biopsy done to check for organ rejection at the cellular level. Once again, the communication from the procedure team is less than stellar, which compounds the frustration.

I am not sure what the next step is yet, but hopefully, we will have a better idea by the end of the week.

Tasha and I are tapped out. It seems like indecision and overly cautious have become the strategy to appease the medical powers, and we are left in their wake, dealing with the emotional, mental, physical, and financial fallout.

I apologize for this update’s rawness, but my patience and civility toward ineptness are gone.

We are digging deep for this next battle. As a close friend told me today, it’s okay not to be okay, and well, we’re not okay right now. As we look toward the next few days, we remind ourselves that this is just temporary and just a short-term setback.

So, as usual, continue to pray for Latasha’s speedy recovery on this next part of the rollercoaster.