Avarie needs to eat a lot of Bananas!

When we got to the hospital Thursday they did Avarie's labs and everything came back looking good except for her Potassium Levels. They came back at critical levels. We were admitted over to the hospital with in about 10 minutes. We were going to be admitted anyway, but usually it takes a couple of hours to go from the clinic to admission. At least that is how it has always gone in the past, but because they needed to give her a potassium infusion immediately and they can't do that in the clinic we were taken over and started right away. She was also very dehydrated but they did not want to rehydrate her until they got her potassium up because if you add more fluids into her it can just lower her levels more. A normal potassium rate is 3.5 and Avarie was coming back at 2.1. She was given a potassium infusion and then her levels were taken again, but it only bumped her up to 2.7 so she was given a second potassium infusion. They take about 3 hours to administer. After the second potassium infusion her levels only went up to 3, but the Dr wanted to get her chemo started and just monitor her potassium levels. 3 is no longer a critical level, it is still really low, but not critical. In the morning when they checked it again her levels had dropped back down to 2.1 so they they started administering oral potassium. I haven't talked to Craig yet this morning to see if that helped bring her numbers up or not yet. They had to switch to oral potassium because her chemo was going and they can't stop the chemo once it is going. The chemo takes 24 hours to administer, so it should have stopped this morning, but I haven't been able to find out whats going on today. The reason potassium is such a big deal is that it is directly related to your heart. Too much or too little can damage your heart, although they did tell me that too much is much more dangerous then too little. Avarie is not handling this stay very well, I think partly because she was just feeling so sick when we went there, she just started keeping things down yesterday afternoon because they can give her antinausea meds through her iv rather than her stomach. Everytime I tried to give her antinausea meds through her stomach she would throw it up with in a few minutes, she couldn't tolerate anything on her stomach. She just keeps wanting to go home and she wants to know how long until she can go home. I have learned my lesson on that one. I never promise her a time that she is going home, because we just never know when we are going to go home. I am pretty sure it will be a couple of weeks this time. We have another round of chemo this next Thursday and that is a 5 day chemo stay. So I doubt we will make it home from this chemo before Thursday, but it is possible we could at least come home for one day on Wednesday and then just go back the next morning, but I am not holding my breath on that.
I found out that some of the nurses at the hospital are following Avarie's blog. I am so excited and yet nervous about that. It makes me scared I am going to not explain some of the medical stuff accurately, but I guess if I don't they can correct me when I see them. The nurses got on and printed off the pictures of the other nurses in the tutu's and pasted somewhere in the hospital. I have heard about it, but I haven't seen it yet. So sorry Chris for the embarrassing pictures of you in the Tutu, but you sure where a good sport about it. Also there was a little drama that went on with one of the nurses that we love and I just wanted to take a minute to tell everyone how much we love Trisha. She is one of our favorite nurses there and we adore her. When we are going back there is a small handful of nurses that Avarie asks for and Trisha is definitely one of the first.
I'll hopefully post later about any results of the potassium stuff.