Daddy had a pretty good night. Mom said they both actually slept pretty good. The nurse was giving Daddy all his morning meds when I got here this morning along with his morphine. He was in right much pain until the morphine kicked in and then he's been a sleep most of the morning.
The Pain Management Specialist came in this morning and talked to us about changing Daddy's pain medications or actually adjusting them. They are switching his morphine from the pills to a liquid that can be put down his feeding tube and they are reducing the strength from 30 mg. to 15 mg. They would like to get him off the morphine because she said with prolonged use it can cause kidney problems (as if he didn't already have enough of that). They are talking about increasing the Fentynal patch but won't do that today. They have also started him on a new pain medication (Lycra) that they said won't keep him so sedated.
Dr. Shertz who is with the Blue Ridge Cancer Center and the admitting doctor came by to talk about all the medications Daddy is on. He is stopping several of the medications and lowering some of the others. He said again that Daddy was just on way to much medication (15 + different prescriptions). He did say that it was going to take a little while to get all his medication straightened out so he's going to be here for several more days. We just hope that he's out of here by Monday because the Doctor said that Medicare won't pay for the Cyber Knife treatment if he's in the hospital. It will only cover it on an outpatient basis. Isn't that stupid?. You'd think it would be the other way around. This Dr. Shertz seems to be on the ball with things and is taking a proactive approach to Daddy's treatment. Although he kept pushing Mom and Dad about a living will. He talked about it Monday night, then he kept asking about it yesterday and then today he was pretty insistent that Daddy's chart needed to have this information. He said that in his opinion with Daddy's age and health condition that he felt Daddy's status should be DNR. He said that if for some chance his heart stopped or his lungs failed he didn't believe they would be able to bring him back anyway so why put Daddy and us through that. So Daddy finally said okay to the DNR, but I don't think he fully understands what the Doctor was talking about. I know this is a formality and needs to be done, but it really aggravated us that he pressed this issue so much.
I will say that Daddy's sense of humor has been pretty good and he's been joking with the nurses. One nurse asked him if he was still in pain and he paused a minute and said "Well, yeah.. you're still here aren't you." and then he just laughed. This was a little while after he had the new pain medication. He does seem to be a little silly, but as long as he's not in pain I guess silly is A.O.K.
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