May 25, 2012

They're done. We are going to need to stay overnight...maybe more. Things looked pretty good, but I'll update later.

**Updated**
So Dr.Terry (urologist) spent a good bit of time just irrigating clots. He said there where lots and lots of clots in there (400 ccs worth or so). Once he got those out of Clayton's bladder, he took a look around. He said that the bleeding was definitely coming from the bladder. That is a good thing in that it means it is not coming from the kidney. He went on that overall the bladder looked really good. The only place he could see that would have been the cause of the bleeding, was a dime-size area that looked very irritated. Our best guess to the cause is still from one of the chemo drugs, but because they do not have equipment here that is good enough to get a good look, Dr.Terry suggests that we have someone check it out again down the road.
Dr.Terry was trying to avoid doing a catheter, but in the end he felt it was necessary to do a 3-way catheter to do continuous irrigation on Clayton's bladder. What that means is that the catheter has two lumens; one to pump sterile saline into his bladder and another to drain both the saline and urine our of his bladder. The point of this is to prevent any blood in his bladder from having a chance to form clots because once blood starts forming clots it seems to just keep bleeding according to another urologist. We want to keep his bladder clot free and irrigated in order to give it a chance to heal. The plan is to slowly irrigate his bladder at a slower and slower rate and provided everything stays free and clear, then we will go home on Sunday. Well, no matter what we have to make it work for us to still get to NYC Tuesday.
Hind sight is always 20/20 and looking back I think Dr.Terry, George and myself kind of wish we had gone ahead and done this on Wednesday. However, we were all trying to spare Clayton from this if possible. Obviously that was not the case.
I will say this though for Dr.Terry...he is awesome. Seriously, he rocks! He isn't perfect, he makes mistakes, but if he makes a mistake, he tells you he made a mistake and he tries like hec to fix it. He cares about his patients deeply. He does not have an ego that gets in the way of what's best for the patient, he gets the fact that you can't lump patients into a mold and he understands that you want to go home!(I'm going to add more about him here tomorrow)

Now we just have to hang out until Sunday and pray nothing else comes up. Pray his bladder heals itself quickly and the bleeding subsides. Pray for us to get to a place where we can move past this.