Content warning: Discussion of hospital stay, procedure, and graphic images in the links.

Checking in for 2024-02-21:

Today is going to be a bit of a whirlwind. I have my Endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography today. Hopefully that will be on time. The procedure is to do an endoscopy to the small bowel where they will make an incision into the bile duct. From there they'll traverse the bile duct to see where the obstruction is and either put in a plastic stent or a metal stent (depending on what they see there). Best case is they can use the stent to expand the duct. Worst case is the presence of stones which can cause infection. But yeah, this tiny little dingus is going to try to repair my bile duct. Modern medicine is pretty amazing.

I had some visitors yesterday. JoDee was here for most of the day keeping me company. My parents dropped by, as did one of the nurses from Cancer Care Associates (Hi, Kim!). She told me that the other nurses wanted to know how I'm doing which was very sweet. Truth be told I'm feeling pretty calm about all of this. Usually I'm pretty "hair on fire" about a lot of things but this just feels like something natural to help with complications from my cancer. We knew this would come eventually, and I'm grateful for the speed at which D. Jaiyesimi was able to get me admitted to the hospital. I literally walked from his office over to the hospital, registered, and walked directly into my room. I need to learn that when push comes to shove that folks have my back on this journey. I'm not alone in this.

I'm doing this check-in early because I'm not sure when I'll have a chance later on. Also I can't have any fluids or meals before the procedure since midnight so making this post is helping me to focus on other things.

More as I know it.