MD Anderson Day 1

We left at 6am to make it to MD Anderson for our first appointment at 7:30am. The reclining wheelchair that Bert, Elizabeth and Sean secured was absolutely wonderful. Mom simply would not have made it through the day without it. We met with Dr. Thomas and her team first. They were empathic (actually alarmed) regarding her pain and immediately scheduled her an appointment with Dr. Ting (Pain Management) and they scheduled an MRI. Dr. Thomas sat down with us and actually explained what multiple myeloma is -- she passed on repeating any tests until Mom's pain is under control so all we had to do was draw blood. So by 10:30am we were already convinced that we were absolutely in the right place. W

We then moved to the pain management center with Dr. Ting (all in the same building - yahoo!). This team was very responsive and he immediately took action. He gave her new drugs including a new cancer pain drug (Fentora) and Morphine. Then he scheduled a vertebroplasty for tomorrow morning. This is the procedure that we asked Dr. Cagle about and he indicated that it was not an option (argh!). See links for more about vertebroplasty.

About 2pm the computers at MD Anderson went down for 2 hours which greatly delayed our meeting with the anesthesiologist. We finally met with him around 5:00pm then headed down to get the MRI at 6:00pm. However, the MRI center was so backed up that we decided to head home. Mom had gone 14 hours and again, thank God for the reclining wheelchair. We got home at 7:30pm, got her in bed and fed then off to sleep by 9pm. Mom was a total trooper but she was beyond exhausted when we finished ... and we start all over again an hour earlier tomorrow! Keep praying