Thursday November 8, 2007 10:09 PM

Jim’s being a royal pain in the ass because he won’t eat. Yeah- he can’t chew- but he can have soup. He can have cream of wheat (which he likes). He can have other soft things that go down easy. Lord knows the man can’t afford to lose any more weight, but he won’t fix himself anything. It’s almost like he’s acting like a little kid…the more I mention the fact that he needs to eat the more he refuses to do it…like he’s punishing me or something. The only one it’s hurting is him. So I wind up heating soup for him and putting it in front of his face. Then he’ll eat it.

The day Jim’s teeth got pulled Dr. Decidua prescribed Clindamycin for him for ten days. That’s a broad-spectrum antibiotic. The problem is that Jim’s on his third round of treatment for c-diff because he can’t shake it. If you take broad-spectrum antibiotics when you have c-diff, it disrupts the balance of bacteria in the gut and flares up the c-diff, so I told Jim maybe he should forgo taking the Clindamycin unless he gets a fever or an active infection. Jim agreed with me. Doctors are forever giving antibiotics “just in case” and there’s no reason for that. You shouldn’t be taking that crap just for shits and giggles.

Jim was healing nicely. He’s asked me a few times if I can see the implants in his mouth. I think they’re in the back in front of where his wisdom teeth would have been, but it’s hard to tell. I can see a faint glimmer of something that looks silver. It still looks like there’s some teeth in his mouth because of a lot of white material that’s exposed, but that’s actually his bone. He must have good bone structure in there because it’s very prominent. It’s a white ridge going across the front. He’s starting to get that sunken toothless look a little bit, which I know embarrasses him, but it will only be for a little while and it will all be over. A small price to pay in the long run.

Last night I drove up to my mother’s to drop Jimmy off for a couple of days (teacher’s convention- no school) and when I got home around 11:30, one side of Jim’s face was suddenly very swollen. He looked like chipmunk cheek. But he said it was just a little sore, not really painful, and he didn’t have a fever. This morning it’s back down to normal size. No Clindamycin needed yet. Hopefully it stays that way.

Many doctors and dentists Jim saw over the years asked if he ever did crystal meth, because he had classic “meth mouth”. Jim never did any of that shit, but you could tell some of these doctors didn’t believe him when he told them so. So that got me to thinking….I wonder what the process is with crystal meth users that actually destroys their teeth? What is in the meth to make the teeth go bad? So I looked it up online. Using meth causes the body to flood with adrenaline and epinephrine. Those substances make the blood vessels that supply the gums shrink, reducing the blood flow to the teeth. The high adrenaline level also decreases saliva production, allowing the stomach acids to eat away at the tooth enamel. Well, guess what a pheochromocytoma secretes? Adrenaline and epinephrine. There you go. So in reality, Jim really DID have “meth mouth”, just not caused by using meth. I asked him when his teeth started going bad. We’ve been together eight years, and in the beginning they weren’t great, but they weren’t horrible either. He said about eight years ago. You figure the adrenaline would need a little time to start working away at your teeth, so I guess that would date the tumor to somewhere around nine years ago. It’s really funny how seemingly unconnected problems with your body can be traced down to one root cause.

Remember how I’ve mentioned in this blog that pheos tend to run in families, and the doctors at Lahey were talking in the beginning about doing DNA tests to identify a gene in Jim that was carrying this thing? They didn’t push it while we were there and I was too tired to pursue it, but I think I’m going to have to take Jim and Jimmy to a geneticist, and get Jimmy tested with an endocrinologist. I’m a little worried about Jimmy possibly having one of these. First, one symptom in children is night sweats. The last couple of years, Jimmy sweats so much at night that I’ve had to keep a towel over his pillows when he goes to sleep, because if not, the pillowcases are soaked through by the next morning. There were a couple of times when I checked on him late at night that I had to wake him up and change his pillowcases because the bed was sopping. Another weird thing about Jim that we just chalked up to “weird thing about Jim” was the fact that he never had to pee. What’s the first thing everybody does when they get up in the morning? Pee, of course! Doesn’t matter if you’re male or female. But Jim could be up for hours until he had to go. MAYBE he’d have to go twice a day…tops. The high level of adrenaline also causes decreased urine production. Now that the tumor’s out he goes first thing in the morning like normal people. Jimmy doesn’t pee either. In the morning when he gets up I force him to go in the bathroom and at least TRY to go, but if left to his own devices on the weekends he’ll go several hours after getting up before he goes to the bathroom. I used to joke and say, “Like father like son,” but now I’m starting to get concerned. I’m not freaking or anything, but we need to check this out. I had mentioned testing for a pheo to his pediatrician once but the guy just poo-poo’d me. I’m not listening anymore. Even if, God forbid, the kid has one, the chances of it being in the neck near vital nerves is extremely, extremely slim. These things are almost never in the neck.

Tuesday November 6, 2007 9:31 PM

Those terrible rotten stumps of teeth that used to be in Jim's mouth are now OUT. Thank God.

Decidua's office told us to get to the hospital at 7:15 a.m. yesterday. So I had to get my in-laws to come down Sunday and spend the night to get Jimmy ready for school in the a.m. and Jim and I left for Philly at about 6:15. THEY DIDN'T TAKE HIM BACK TO GET PREPPED FOR SURGERY UNTIL 11:30! Can you believe that? After we had sat there for a couple of hours I talked to the charge nurse and found out that Decidua had two procedures in front of Jim. So there was NEVER any reason for Jim and I to be there that early. A TOTAL disrespect of our time. You can imagine how hot I was. I told the charge nurse to let Decidua know that he better find some aloe vera gel because I was gonna make his ears burn when I got a hold of him. And I did. But he blamed it on his office staff. Yeah, right.

Remember the debate last week about whether or not Jim was getting implants? I saw the release form that Jim signed when he went for his pre-op testing and he could have nipped that in the bud a long time ago. The implants were not on the release form. If he had actually READ the thing before he signed it we could have ironed this out in advance, but it's water under the bridge now. I made the nurse amend the release and I told Jim to not let them knock him out until he heard from Decidua's lips that he would do those implants during the tooth pull.

I had to wait in the happy-happy-joy-joy room again. A couple of dirty old men were chatting it up with me....I managed to avoid them for awhile reading a book but when I finished the whole book from cover to cover I couldn't keep avoiding them. One of them was there for his wife who had a mass on her pancreas. Boy, I'm glad we're not in that position. No matter what you're going through there's always someone worse off than you. Then thankfully they called me over to talk with Decidua. The first thing out of his mouth was, "I'm glad you and your husband decided to go with the implants. It will hold the lower dentures in so much better." I told him, "We never DIDN'T decide to go with them. I don't know where this whole debate CAME from."

Jim had to sleep it off for awhile so we didn't get out of Philly until about 6:30 pm. He had quite a bit of bleeding from his mouth all night but it finally calmed down by this morning. He says he feels pretty good. He doesn't have much pain. They wrote him a script for percocet but he hasn't needed to take any so far. I'm worried about him losing more weight by not eating so I keep putting food in front of him and making him eat it. He would never make the effort to make himself something. Sure, he can't chew, but he can have soup. He's not a good patient. He's a total pain in the ass.

So now he's got to heal for six weeks and then he'll get his teeth.