I've been getting flooded with requests for info, so this is just a quick update on Regina's situation as of the middle of the night. It's good news!
Quick note: I will have to hop offline this morning, so I won't be around to tend comments for very long. However, I'm going to send Regina the link to this diary, so this would be a good place to leave your well-wishes, good thoughts, prayers, blessings, etc. for her - and for her husband, who has been to hell and back with her on this.
Details below:
I was offline most of yesterday, but I got the following e-mail update from Kitsap River last night:
All good news: she's at the U, in the ER. She's being treated in their team manner that I know well from my own treatments there. Among other people she's being referred to is an ecological medicine specialist there who is studying and making noise about the effect of pesticides on human beings. She's eating; she ate twice today already in the ER, breakfast and lunch, with no bad reactions, and she's planning to eat dinner there tonight. As she's in the ER, the equipment and medicines needed to rescue her if she does react are all right there, available for speedy use. She's being treated with great care and respect and says this is one of the best trips to the ER she's ever had. And one of the doctors who saw her first at the U made an emphatic point in his notes that hers is a Lyme case and is to be treated as such. Within the next 24 hours, copies of her records from six different providers and places will arrive at the U.
As we spoke, her husband was out walking the dogs and picking up needed toiletries like shampoo at the store. She's confident enough in the U and the treatment she's getting that she feels comfortable with him doing that; she said she told him she'd be fine in the ER.
I am hugely relieved that she's out of Swedish and over at the U. They're working on getting everything into the U system. She is NOT being treated as a psych case at the U. About damn time, too, when it comes to that. I am just completely appalled at how she was treated at Swedish. Finally a doctor admitted to her that there was nothing they felt they could do for her
. . .
She's really tired but asked me to let you and other Kossacks, particularly the Rescue Rangers, know that she'll read and respond to all Kosmail.
FINALLY!!!
She's in a stellar hospital system (the same system that saved my little sister's life by handling her kidney transplant). She's being treated by actual doctors. Actual doctors who recognize that borreliosis is an actual physical disease, and not merely a symptom of being a head case. Actual doctors who can, and apparently will, treat her entire array of conditions along the inflammatory spectrum. Actual doctors who took her life-threatening reactions seriously and found the proper combination to permit her, after two long weeks, to be able to eat again.
But don't take my word for it. In the middle of the night, I got a message from Regina herself:
I will leave the idea of an update to you and others: I don't want to take up too much time in the Diaries ::blush::
. . .
If there are questions that I can answer that would help others understand more of what is going on, I would be glad to answer and clarify. Another really great thing is that our own citisven knows close family friend and they are both working on my charts. It just defies the imagination how these connection come about. But it is another blanket to wear.
. . .
I must get to bed and see what tomorrow brings. For awhile I dreaded awakening to the unrelenting misery. I can say with certainty, tonight is not one.
I know too well about the whole "dreaded awakening to the unrelenting misery" thing.
But now, there's hope.
I think it's going to be a good day.
A few quick thanks from me personally: Nishime (my little sister), Kitsap River; Sara R; DavidW; llbear; and citisven. Each of you knows what you've done. I'm profoundly grateful to each of you, and I love you all for what you've done for our friend (among other things).
