03/06/2024
It's going to be a long one
On the 21st at 3pm I began having bleeding in my ostomy bag, nothing I haven't dealt with before. By 9pm I had emptied 6 bags of blood and was dizzy, light headed, tunnel vision, temporary loss of hearing and couldn't walk, I was having to crawl from my bed to the toilet (10ft). At this time I knew it was hospital time. If I say it's hospital time its bad and I pushed it.
I layed in bed and let all my symptoms calm down and didn't even fight with my wife to call 911 and get an ambulance. I've never seen her so calm while being on the phone and getting our 3 kids up and ready to go to grandma's. My mom got here faster then the firetruck. It was the first time I've seen my mom really cry during this whole cancer journey. I agreed to take the ambulance ride because I couldn't sit up with out getting extremely dizzy.
The bleeding continued in the ER (was there for about 48hrs) before they got me a room. By this time the bleeding stopped and I'd had a blood transfusion of 2 bags. They put me on my blood thinners and moved me to a room because we still don't know why and I want leaving till we knew why.
6hrs after taking my blood thinners I began bleeding again, just as bad as the first go around. After 2 bags I was transferred to the ICU to be watched. We did a CT scan and found i was bleeding around my stoma (as my wife predicted and brought it up in the ER). I was taken into a surgery to basically cauterize and glue the areas that were bleeding. The 1 of 2 options I had that comes with a 4% chance of it breaking loose and causing a PE or killing off my stoma. Or the other was 100% chance of bleeding out and dying. I did receive one more bag of blood.
The surgery has worked and I've had absolutely no bleeding. I was moved back to a regular room and everything was going good. I received 2 bags of iron infusion because my blood count was still in the 7s but stable.
I've been home a week still no bleeding but I've been lacking energy. Had a follow up with my oncologist yesterday. My oncologist said my body and myself are the toughest he's ever seen while going through this. My labs yesterday show a great increase in my blood count. I left the hospital at 7.4 and yesterday they were at 10.2 which it normal for me. Apparently this would take a "normal" person 3-4 weeks to jump this much. Again he said my mental toughness and support system! He did say I was stubborn as well, that's that Millus in me.
So again I thank you for following this journey, thank you for your prayers, thank you for adding me to your prayer lists, thank you for your thoughts, thank for the check up texts, thank you four checking in on my wife to make sure she's doing good.
Thank you to my Wife, Mom, Step Dad, Dad, Sister, Brother In-law. With out all of you this would not be an easy journey (not saying it is easy or has been) but you do help make it less stressful for sure!
It's going to take a lot more to take me out!
