Yesterday's lunch stayed down fine, and her nausea is now under control. She started taking olanzapine when on chemotherapy to help control the nausea, and it seems to be working great in this situation as well. They've OKed a solid food diet for Karen today, but she had already eaten breakfast by this time. So far the solid food seems to be staying down and not causing any problems.
Everything else has been progressing nicely as well. She was able to get a decent amount of sleep at night again so I'm sure that helps. Her pain level is still at a 3 out of 10 but she's using a lot less hydromorphone. She has been taking some of her medications orally, which they like to do before they send you home. She still has the PCA pump because they expect the pain level to increase as she begins to move around. Her "bed rest" order has been removed and they are now encouraging her to walk around bit. Everything related to her digestion seems to be working again, but this also means they expect her to be using the bathroom "8 to 10 times a day." So she'll get some moving around from that.
Those first 24 hours of nausea and vomiting weren't conducive to healing and was part of the reason she was confined to bed for that time. We're still happy with the progression, but it looks like it might end up being closer to 5 days than the 2 or 3 the doctors had hoped would be possible. Everyone always says how healthy she looks, even when she's often not feeling well at the time. While at first we were surprised, it's happened so often that we now find it funny when we meet a doctor for the first time and they say, "you look so much better than you sound on paper." And it's not just doctors, it's the nurses, friends, and family. So it's easy to overestimate her recovery speed. We aren't disappointed with the recovery speed.
