A slight scare and a whole day at the hospital

On Thursday, dad started noticing his left arm was swelling a little bit (I didn't hear about this until Friday morning - or we would have been off to the doctor then!). By Friday morning, it was pretty darn swollen!  We called the cancer clinic; they said go over to the hospital for an X-ray of dad's chemo port (perhaps an infection? he had no fever though, no other symptoms).

So off to the hospital we went; 2 hours waiting for the X-ray, then 2 more hours waiting for the cancer clinic on-call to respond (they had already closed at noon on Friday); chemo port looked fine. Another 2 hours waiting for the next test - ultrasound of dad's left arm - and then an hour or so to get another response from the cancer clinic again. We were getting kinda tired of that little radiology waiting room.

Diagnosis: Dad has a blood clot in his left arm, I guess not an uncommon occurence in cancer patients.  They recommended we go over to the ER and potentially have dad admitted to the hospital. In the ER (which was amazingly quiet! you'd never guess it was Friday night!), they reviewed again, decided to put dad on bloodthinners to clear up the clot, but he did not need to be admitted.

So after a quick tutorial for dad on how to take the injection (pretty much the same as their insulin injections), and a stop at the pharmacy, we returned home at 7 pm. That was a very long day and dad is pretty tired though very happy to be home - today is a resting day!

Dad now has to take this injection once a day, plus a coumadin pill. Once the coumadin has kicked in and his blood tests out correctly, he will not need the injection.  (And a doozie it is - the first 7 days was $350.  But now that he met his deductible, future doses will be a fraction of that.)  Hope he needs to be on this injection for only a short time.

We'll be calling the cancer clinic on Monday to make sure they can do his blood level test during his Tuesday appointment, otherwise we'll be at the hospital lab on Monday for the blood test.

Keep thinking good thoughts for dad!  Blood clots are scary, and so are blood thinners.