Vacation with a scary ending

This post has more "technical" information about my husband's health situation and daily life at the hospital. I'm using this blog also to inform friends and family about what goes on. But before I start my story, I need to give some background information so you can understand.

My husband has what the doctors call a central fever. The part of his brain responsible for controlling his temperature was affected by the bleeding and very often his temperature changes. He takes Tylenol 4 times a day to help a bit, but it's not enough. So every once a while, his temperature increases and that causes an increase on his spasms and the heart rate too.

Nothing scary until one week before I left on vacation (around mid June) he had a more serious episode of very high fever with lots of spasms and a fast heart rate. It seemed as if he just got back from running a marathon and it wouldn't slow down. I was with him and got very worried. So, the doctor followed up with urine and blood test to make sure it's not an infection that was causing this. And he confirmed, once again, this is just his central fever attacking. Next day he was ok, back to normal.

Since his situation is pretty much stable, I decided to go visit my friends in the city I used to live before getting married. The plan was to stay two weeks cause I had a lot of people that wanted to see me. They represent a big part of my support system and they are far away from my daily hospital life.

Everything was fine until two days before my trip back, when a doctor called to warn that my husband was having an episode of very high temperature, and this was causing a lot of spasms and his heart to beat very fast, up to 195 beats per minute. He was afraid that if that continued for a while, he could have a cardiac arrest and, in that case, he had to ask me if I wanted him to be treated or to let him die. They, of course, would assist with the pain with lots and lots of morphine. Of course I freaked out, cause I was not expecting this type of call so early in this process.

Like the previous time, he got better once the fever went away. But as I heard the description of how it happened, it seems to me that this episode was even worse. He bit the left lower part of his lips for a long time and now it's all swollen and almost black. They gave him morphine, muscle relaxing pills and Valium. Oh, yes, this one was a really bad one.

I cut my trip short and came back as soon as the airline companies let me. What bothers me the most about this is to think how uncomfortable he gets when these things happen and there's nothing I can do. And that these "more scary" episodes keep happening every time he has hight fever. I can only watch and wait, and that kills me.