Update 2/2/08

Hello everyone,
We apologize for not getting an update for your yesterday. The past two days have not been the best for all of us. Derek has been in a lot of pain and he doesn’t handle it well. The top of his incision is not healing well. We have had them clean it everyday and put a clean bandage on which comes off within a couple of minutes of them putting it on. They don’t routinely change bandages. You have to request a clean bandage and then they contact the doctor to come and change it. For some unknown reason, he has developed pain in both elbows. We don’t know if it has anything to do with the stem cells or what. We were told by one patient that pain is the first thing that you get back. Why in his elbows, we don’t know. His arms hurt because of all the IV pokes. We have had a lot of disagreements with the nurses and staff the past two days. They insist that they have to put new Ivs in every day. Today they took the one out that was in yesterday without even trying it, put a new one in after several tries, took it back out this afternoon, and then two hours later came in to put another one in just for one bottle of medicine. The past two days Derek has been giving the nurses a hard time and refusing to let them shave him or poke him any more. From what the other patients have told us that have had surgery here, is that he will have to continue to have Ivs every day until he leaves. I don’t know if Nicole and I can play referee for nine more days. We aren’t making many friends with the staff at this rate.
To make things more frustrating, yesterday Tony and Lucy told us that they had changed Derek’s last two stem cell injections schedule. He was supposed to get one last night and one next Tuesday. But because of their spring festival, he will get one next Monday and one on Saturday the 9th. We were also told that there would be no acupuncture or therapy from Feb. 6th through Feb. 13th. This didn’t make us happy because we will have to sit here for the last week just waiting for the last injection with nothing to do. The stores and restaurants are all closed for the holiday. We feel that Beiki Biotech, the company that we scheduled this with, should not schedule the patients to come for the week of the festival. We all paid a lot of money to come here, along with the time off from jobs, and the distance that we had to travel to get acupuncture and physio here that we can’t get at home; only to find out that one week is wasted doing nothing. The other American family feels the same way. We were told that a representative of the company will be at our hospital in a day or two. We are hoping to talk to her, so hopefully this won’t happen to other families next year.
Ben just came in to show us what Gregg, the American from Arkansas, bought him and Paul as a going away present. He ordered them their supper. They had chicken heads, chicken feet and silk worms. They were so gross to even look at and they actually ate some of all of them. We were squirming just hearing the description of what they were like and what they looked like. Yuk!!!
Love, Derek, Nicole and Kathy