Friday, January 30

This morning, they gave Sou's medication before doing the dressing change. It went really well. His pain was less than the previous packing. This time, two surgeons were here to do the packing. They both agreed that his wound looked a lot smaller and was healing really well. Just like last time, Sou fell asleep afterwards. Around 11am, the group of docs stopped by. Jaime wasn't there because it was probably her day off. The leader said that he thought Sou was making great progress and that his main reason for being in the hospital is his wound. Sou didn't need to be in there for his chemo. Dr. Shustov, the leader, said he could do chemo as an outpatient. But because of the high doses of fentanyl for Sou's pain, there was no way they were releasing him. 

"I would say, at least four or five more days you would be here," he told Sou. 

I got a chance to sneak out of the hospital for a few hours. My mom took me to Bellevue to pick up her paycheck. We went to Alaska USA at a Fred Meyer's and they said the check needed to be put on hold. The teller said that nowadays, with the economy, any check can have a hold put on it. My mom was pissed off and we ended up going to a Wells Fargo. I told her she should move back to Alaska. Thousands of people were loosing their jobs in the Seattle area and that didn't seem to be the case in Anchorage. The gas prices in Alaska seemed ridiculous but I haven't heard anything about job shortages. We continued on to a California Pizza Kitchen. The food was pretty good. It had that "fresh ingredients" taste to it. It was too bad they didn't have one in Alaska because it seems like every time something new opens, the whole Anchorage flocks to its doors (e.g. Target and DQ).

I was dropped off at the hospital after. I managed to save some pizza and pasta for Sou. I walked into his room and he was awake. He ate a slice of the garlic chicken pizza but turned down the tequila chicken pasta. It wasn't long until he fell asleep again. I figured that would be a great time to read more of my textbooks. I ended up falling asleep too while reading. I woke up around 6pm when the nurse came in with Sou's medications. Like always, I poured him a cup of water so he could swallow the ginormous pills. It was the acyclovir that seemed to be huge. A nurse told me last week that they make bigger pills than that. It makes me wonder why they don't just make a smaller-sized pill and have the dose be two or three pills. Sou took another nap after that. At 10pm, the nurse gave him his 4 doses of fentanyl before changing his dressing. Like the other nurses, she took a little bit longer packing the wound than the surgeons did. She did make sure to clean around the wound and made sure the things that needed to be sterile, remained sterile. Sou did the usual moaning, but not as loud. He said it was a little less painless than the previous dressing changes. Sometime during the procedure, the nurse needed me to hold his buttcheeks. While doing so, I noticed that the wound did look a lot smaller. Yaaay! It's healing! Not a whole lot went on that night. He received his regular antibiotics and chemo via IV. He also swallowed more pills. They took away his morphine button while I was gone and said they wanted him to try and make do with oxycodone. Later on I went online to check the claims for Sou's health insurance. Thank God he had insurance. He had a million labs that were already submitted to Aetna. Every single doctor that came and talked to Sou at Providence ER billed at least $400. The anesthesia from his first surgery was $1,700. He only gets to pay 20% of everything. But his maximum out-of-pocket is $2,000. He'll definitely meet that once this is all over. I still didn't see a charge for the flight down from Anchorage. One of the ambulance bills was around $550. A couple months ago, the thought of bills reaching that amount would have made my jaw drop. But as your perspective on life changes, those bills are nothing. A price tag cannot be put on someone's life.