Note from Stacey

Sasha, thanks for writing! I hope your injury is healing nicely. I’ll e-mail you. Wednesday I had a procedure done by Dr. Olsen and Dr. Dhillon to drain the lymphatic fluid from my lungs. The exciting part was not actually the procedure, but the ride to the hospital. We were just turning off El Camino, about 5 minutes from the entrance when I started heaving and throwing up dinner from the night before. Well, Dave had one hand on the wheel and the other hand unrolling gobs of paper towels to hand to me. Not a drop made it to the car seat or my clothes. I was very impressed with poor Dave’s “nursing while driving” skills. By the time we arrived at the hospital entrance, I had nothing left in my stomach and I was feeling comparatively better. It was a simple outpatient procedure done in the ATU unit of the hospital. They gave me a local anesthesia, then inserted a catheter into my lung and drained the fluid into a clear glass bottle. I was surprised how much fluid came out! It was 700 ml, almost 3/4 of a liter! It looked like milky beer, complete with a froth on top. It was hard to imagine that all that fluid was inside of me and taking up space in my lungs. Stacey, from Belmont