I really don't know what to title this one. "The Beginning of the End?" Yes, this marked a significant change in Gloria's health, but most of it really wasn't related to her death. Yes, it kind of marked the start of my career as Gloria's caregiver, but she always *had* had health issues.
Number Two Daughter was moving house, so we were babysitting the kids. We took them to a movie. They wanted to see the new Transformers movie. Which was in 3D. And was also around three hours long. Wearing 3D glasses, for so long, is somewhat disorienting. Coming out of the theater, and crossing the parking lot, Gloria slipped on a patch of slimy mud that had been the bottom of a drying puddle. She went down. She didn't get up again. When I got to her she was in an awful lot of pain.
I drove her, and the kids, to the hospital. We called Number Two Daughter, who came and got her kids. It turned out that Gloria had broken her shoulder: shattering the top of the humerus into four pieces.
It was, of course, extremely painful. As with any joint break, it took an awfully long time to heal. In the initial stages of healing, Gloria was in the big armchair/massage chair that I had won at a trade show, very early in our marriage. It allowed her to sleep in a semi-reclining position, and ensured that she didn't roll onto her shoulder during the night. However, Gloria was not able to manage to get out of the chair by herself. So, during the night, when she needed to get up to the bathroom, she had her cell phone with her beside the chair, and would call me on the house phone, so that I would wake up, come downstairs, get her out of the chair so that she could go to the bathroom, and then put her back in the chair, and go back upstairs to bed.
It was her right shoulder that was broken. While everyone was extremely sympathetic to her plight, and her pain, when they went to comfort her, all of them, universally, patted her on her right shoulder.
She went to a physiotherapist over a period of about a year. The physiotherapy seemed to help a bit at first, but then she hit a plateau. We went back to the doctor, who eventually got more medical imaging of her shoulder, which determined that her rotator cuff was torn, and therefore physiotherapy was contraindicated. Her right shoulder was somewhat restricted after that.
While it can't be said that this problem caused the further medical problems, this was the beginning of a long string of surgeries and medical issues.
Gloria had had problems all her life with IBS, Irritable Bowel Syndrome. She also had a hiatus hernia, which caused gastric reflux, frequently seriously painful. Her stomach and gastrointestinal problems seemed to be getting worse. And then one day, she seemed to have heart or lung problems, so we went to emergency. It turned out that the hiatus hernia had opened up sufficiently that her stomach was actually in her chest, where it is not supposed to be. It was impeding her heart and lungs, because of the stomach occupying the space that they should have used for normal movements.
The hospital did surgery on the hiatus hernia. However, there are two ways that you can do this. One is to completely open the abdominal wall, and do the surgery with the abdomen exposed. The other way to do it is a kind of keyhole surgery, using four holes, and special manipulators through the holes to reposition organs and sew up the diaphragm. This was the choice of surgery in Gloria's case.
Gloria has always had problems with wounds taking a long time to heal. In this case, the even the small surgical holds that were used for her diaphragm surgery, reopened after the surgery; a process known as dehiscence. We went to the ambulatory care clinic, which we tended to refer to as the wound clinic, and, revisiting two or three times per week, had absolutely wonderful care from the nurses who viewed, cleaned, packed, and explained all the processes, in caring for the wound over a period of at least three months. Finally, on one visit to the wound clinic, when Gloria was not feeling very well, the nurse treating her on that occasion said, "Congratulations, your wound is finally healed. Now go straight to emergency, because you're very sick!"
So, we were back at emergency. In this case, the problem was not determined right away, and so Gloria was admitted to hospital, and I went home. During the night, the nurse who was on shift where Gloria was, was someone that we knew. She knew that Gloria tolerated an awful lot of pain, and that if she was complaining of pain that it must be extremely painful, and so alerted a doctor, and insisted that Gloria be seen, since something was obviously seriously wrong. I got a call at 7:00 in the morning. The doctor had determined that the previous surgery had completely let go, and the surgery would have to be done all over again. They transferred her to the Vancouver General Hospital, and did the surgery with the abdomen fully open, rather than trying to do the keyhole surgery again. The surgery, in this case, took at least eight hours. Gloria ended up in the post recovery post-surgical board with at least a dozen tubes and wires running in and out of her body.
It was a while before Gloria could go home. And then the wound dehisced again. So it was back to the wound clinic, for another three months, to get that wound healed up again. In this case, when Gloria went home, she had one tube still running out of her stomach, left there to stabilize her stomach in a position where an artificial scar would be formed inside, anchoring the stomach in position so that it wouldn't move again. I had to clean her tube and wound twice a day, in order to prevent infection.
And then, roughly a year later, while she was still occasionally visiting the surgeon to make sure that her internal organs were settling into place properly, she got an inflammation around the surgical site. Again. We went back to the General, seeing the doctor, who sent us over to the emergency ward, immediately, to have this inflammation lanced. It turned out that there was a piece of surgical suture, that had been in place from either the first or the second surgery, which the body had finally infected and rejected. So, once again, it was back to the wound clinic, for another three months of sessions two and three times a week. We were getting quite familiar with the wound clinic staff by this point.
Sometime after (and, once again, there was no causal link), there were some troubling indications, and Gloria was sent to an oncologist. In pursuing the situation with regard to the cancer, it was also determined that there was a problem with her thyroid, so she was seeing a thyroid specialist at the same time. Nothing was ever really determined about a specific problem with the thyroid, although she was put on hormone replacement medication, a synthetic form of the hormone that they thyroid normally produces to give you energy. So, once again, two things were going on that seem to have seemed to possibly be related, but actually had no relation to each other, as far as anybody could ever determine.
The cancer was Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. This was diagnosed, but the oncologist wanted to get more details about it, so Gloria was referred for a PET scan. As it happens, I went to UBC just after the TRIUMF cyclotron was put into operation, where PET scanning was invented. So I knew something of the situation and process. However, due to some kind of administrative mix-up, Gloria was delayed in terms of being scheduled for a PET scan, and so it was some months before she was actually scanned.
The PET scan process is quite interesting. The process involves being injected with a sugar solution, where some of the component atomic particles have been replaced with positrons. Because it is sugar, the sugars end up in areas that are more active than others, and, when you have tumours, cancer is generally one of the most active sites in your body. Therefore, by looking at where positron radiation is being emitted from, you know where the sugar molecules are collecting, and can therefore pinpoint cancerous sites. The positron scanning is paired with a CAT scan so that there is a reference as to where the emitting sites are in particular organs in the body.
As well as knowing about PET scanning, as a security maven, I also know something about border security procedures. The technician doing the PET scanning, when she gave Gloria the injection of sugar, noted that she should not try and cross the border for the next 72 hours. Gloria found this kind of surprising, and I burst out laughing, because I knew why this was the case. At the US border land crossings, there are extremely sensitive radiation detectors. These detectors are so sensitive that, yes, anyone who has had radiation treatments, of whatever kind, will set the detectors off.
In the delay between Gloria's initial referral, and the final scheduled PET scan, Gloria's lymphoma had progressed from stage one to stage three. It was an extremely aggressive form of lymphoma. This is actually a good thing. In the same way that a high performance car requires lots of time in the shop to maintain its operation, aggressive cancers are more susceptible to chemotherapy, and therefore, in a sense, aggressive cancers are easier to treat. Gloria was treated with chemotherapy. At least six sessions, and possibly eight. I can't recall anymore.
I can recall that the chemotherapy brought her white cell count down very drastically. In order to try and boost her immune system, she was prescribed an extremely expensive drug, which did not exactly *increase* white cell production, but did release the white cells earlier than they would normally have been released. This meant that she did have some white cells in her bloodstream, but that they were primarily immature. We joked about having to rely on her teenage white cells.
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Introduction and ToC: https://fibrecookery.blogspot.com/2023/10/mgg-introduction.html
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