Medicine man

I thought I’d take Erica up on her offer to post on her blog. Our lives have certainly changed a lot in the past three months and my role has become that of Medicine Man.

Gavin receives a dizzying number of medications now, and we quickly realised that the more of them that we can administer ourselves, the more freedom we would have.

When we’re at home a nurse comes by each day to flush his central line and do any other maintenance tasks that need attention like dressing changes etc. Of course that means we need to be home instead of out in the world enjoying our hospital-free days.  We wanted to go away for a night over the Labour Day weekend so I had to learn how to do most of his daily nursing tasks.

Our day goes something like this. At 6.30am he gets two drugs via his feeding tube; one for stomach acid, and one to prevent pneumonia . If he’s feeling nautious then he also gets two drugs for that. I then have to stick a needle in his leg for his dose of blood thinner.  For about a week after each round of chemotherapy I also have to dose him with the magic GCSF.  Then he gets his brekky feed through his tube and I head off for work.

The process is repeated again at 6.30pm minus the GCSF.

His central line also gets flushed daily, but I’ve only just started doing that so it hasn’t found a regular slot in our routine yet.

Gavin is amazingly matter-of-fact about it all. He actually grabs the end of his feeding tube and hands it to me saying, “It goes in here, Dad.”. The only part that he really takes exception to are the injections, but who can blame him for that.