Open Door food and Dr. Flanigan

January 11, 2024

Alright, I’m just in the middle of an awful medical situation. This week I was scheduled to drive down to Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, for four days this week. We managed to get it down to three, but I’m still here a lot. I’m writing about yesterday now. First of all, we screwed up on food for a procedure. It turned how that when I was doing the targeted chemo that they usually sedate you for, you have to have not eaten the whole day to be sedated. We forgot about that, so I’d already had my meds at 8 am with a granola bar, and then while we were down, Papa was trying to get me to eat more to spur my bowels, so he gave me a few pear slices too. I can’t even blame it on him though, because they said that even eating the granola bar (required for my other meds) would have stopped me from being being sedated. The procedure was a little painful, which is significantly more than last time when I felt nothing. It was still doable, but there were definitely moments of pain. I don’t think I ever want to do it without sedation again. And they did tell me that they’d seen some small improvements on scans after the first one, so maybe I’ll do more. I'm currently scheduled for one in about a month I think, in February. Before we went in for the procedure, we met up with Dr. FlanIgan, the neurosurgeon. He said the CT scan of my head looked good and that there was improvements on the MRI they did of my spine. When we went home, I pretty much immediately drove over to Open Door to do my volunteer shift. One woman, who’s a volunteer and also a nurse, was surprised to hear that I’d done my procedure on the same day. Really, that's just very in character for me.