A lot of different doctors make rounds through the hospital. We get visited by the the oncology team, the palliative care team, and general surgery. To keep things from being total mayhem, each patient has one doctor who has final say in which medical treatments they recommend. For Karen, this has always been the doctor who performed her first surgery at Mayo. However, this time he was out of the country, so she had someone different this time. The end result of all of this is our doctor was paged and ran off to surgery before she could discharge Karen. While everyone else seemed to agree she was good to go, she wasn't discharged until 3pm.
It might sound bad, but I think the extra time made us feel a bit more comfortable about going home since Karen had more experience with solid food. She got to eat both breakfast and lunch at the hospital, and they both went smoothly. There's still bloating afterwards, which honestly makes me a little nervous. But we've never dealt with a mechanical blockage before, and the doctors don't seem overly concerned about it, so maybe it's par for the course. There's also still some pain near her diaphragm on the left side. No one is really sure if it's related to the blockage, the chemo, or even the cancer itself. When we left her vision was still a bit blurry, but better than the day before. And now at the end of the day, it has cleared up entirely. We're not sure which medication caused it, but we have our suspicions. Shortly before her vision went blurry she was given chlorpromazine (Thorazine) for nausea, and that's one of the new medications we were trying out.
The doctors had said she would have to "change her diet." And that just sounds ominous. Karen in particular got the impression there would have to be permanent changes, but it was never brought up again. They did put her on a low fiber diet, but that's not really the type of diet you stay on long term. We asked the nurse if the discharge instructions said anything about how long Karen was suppose to stay on a low fiber diet, and she said no, but that when she sees it after something like this, it's typically two weeks. A little research on Mayo Clinic's website suggests you slowly start added fiber back into your diet as your digestive system returns to normal. We'll have to call to find out more, but this last bit sounds the most reasonable.
When you look into the diet itself, the low fiber diet sounds quite unhealthy. The more cooked or processed the food is, the lower the fiber. So raw carrots, that's a no no. Canned carrots? That's ok. Whole wheat bread? Nope. Donuts? You bet. Beans? No. Potato chips? Yes. Actually, it almost sounds like a diet you could enjoy. Almost.
