ZACHARY'S PAGE

Welcome to Zachary's Web Page. It has been provided to keep everyone updated about his progress. It is also the gathering place for the Cancer Sucks Club!

Journal

Sunday, September 28, 2008 5:31 PM CDT

Another long gap between updates……..sorry.

Such is life in the world of retail. Long hours, late hours, early hours, lots and lots of hours.

I don’t know if Murphy ever wrote a law pertaining to medical emergencies, but if he did, it surely would have sounded something like this…..

“All medical emergencies will arise at the most inopportune time of the day, usually in the evening or late at night, and almost always on a weekend when doctors are nowhere near their offices or their phones.”

(Let me wind back the clock to set up this saga for you.)

Zachary was supposed to have a couple of small cavities repaired about a month ago or so when we were in the middle of the blood and platelet drama. Because of his low counts, the dentist postponed that procedure until his counts rebounded. Well, his counts rebounded, so we were on the schedule for Thursday morning. Now, the last time that we were at the dentist, (when they found the cavities) Zachary was complaining of some hot & cold sensitivity in his front lower tooth. That was the tooth that had broken in half while playing soccer a couple of years ago. The dentist inspected it and felt that it was OK, but he mentioned that if the pain persisted, he would consider doing a root canal on it.

We showed up on Thursday for the cavity work and I sent Zachary back alone. About five or ten minutes after he got back there, the dentist came out to speak with me. He informed me that he wanted to postpone the cavity work and do an immediate root canal on the front tooth. He felt that the pain Zachary was experiencing was indicative of a dying nerve. The procedure didn’t take too long, and Zachary said that it wasn’t too bad. We left the dentist, I dropped him off at school, and all was well in the world. (Yeah right!)

After the anesthesia wore off, Zachary started to have a dull ache in his tooth. We thought that a little bit of discomfort was normal after that procedure, so we treated it with Tylenol and didn’t put too much thought into it. That plan lasted until Friday night at 11:30pm when Zachary woke us up practically in tears over the pain he was having in that lower tooth and in his jaw. I immediately called the dentist’s office and left a message on their emergency line. After waiting about 15 minutes, I realized that we were probably NOT going to hear back from them soon enough, so we called the local E.R. We asked about tooth emergencies, and we got the answer that we expected….”We don’t have a dentist on staff in the E.R., all we can do is pain management.”

Well, I can do pain management at home, without waiting for 8 hours to be seen, and without paying HUGE hospital bills. I flipped my mental three-sided coin to choose the right drug, and it came up with Tylenol w/ codeine. We gave him one, and that lasted him until about 4:30 or so when he needed another one. That second one got him to 8:30 when he and Rebecca left for his Saturday morning bowling league. I was still waking up, because I had to be at work at 1pm, and I wanted to get a few things done so that I could watch him bowl before going to work. Right after Rebecca and Zachary left the house, the phone rang….it was the dentist who was on call….she had just found the message and wanted to apologize for not getting back to us sooner. I filled her in with the details of what had happened, and her advice was to watch him for fevers, and any sign of swelling. If he didn’t have swelling, then there was a good chance that we could avoid an infection. I hung up with her and called Rebecca to let her know what the dentist had said. Before I could relay any of that conversation to her, she blurted out, “His mouth and chin area are swollen and puffy.”

(In case you are wondering, that was the EXACT moment when the $hit hit the fan.)

I told her to hang tight, I was going to call the dentist right back and then pick him up for an immediate appointment. (The dentist had given us her cell phone number, and she had said that if his tooth/mouth got worse, that she would meet us at the office and take care of it.) When I got her back on the phone, she told me to hang tight for a few minutes, because she wanted to speak with a specialist about Zachary. As luck would have it, she knew a dentist who specializes in root canals and is a leukemia survivor, so he was very aware and sensitive to the blood count/cancer issues that we were facing. After speaking with him, she called back to inform me that he wanted Zachary to do some warm salt water rinses and to keep an ice pack on his jaw/mouth area. He also said that if the swelling/pain got any worse by 2pm, that he should be seen right away.

I grabbed an ice pack and called Rebecca so that she could have him do the rinse while I was driving over. When I got there, he was bowling and didn’t seem to be in that much pain. Unfortunately, after about 10 minutes of holding the ice pack on his jaw, he started complaining about excruciating pain in his jaw/tooth. We quit the ice pack and he was barely able to finish bowling. I went to work on time, and after being there for about an hour, I got “The Call” from Rebecca.

“We’re at the dentist’s office; she is going to drill some holes in the tooth that is next to the one that had the root canal. It appears as though the second tooth has some swelling, like the nerve was under extreme pressure, trying to compensate for the removal of the first one.” After about 45 minutes, she called back to say that the procedure was done, and that there was a lot of puss and blood that came out when she was drilling, so there was definitely a lot of pressure, which would have been extremely painful.

She scheduled a follow-up visit for Monday morning, to re-inspect both teeth and to decide whether or not to do the second root canal or to just seal up the holes and move on. She also prescribed an anti-biotic to help prevent any infection.

The first root canal set us back close to $500.00. While we were there, Zachary was able to sell 2 books, so if he can sell about 40 more, I will be able to pay that bill when it comes in. I don’t even want to know what the Saturday visit or tomorrow’s visit is going to cost us. Needless to say, I will be pushing my books for years to come.

The good news is that since that emergency visit yesterday, he has not complained of pain. (He’s taking Oxycodone or Tylenol #4 for the pain, so I’m sure that is helping.)

I just looked at the front page of our Caringbridge site, and it looks like we will pass the 700,000 mark for visitors either tonight or tomorrow.

Thank you to everyone who has continued to check in on us!

NOW GET OFF YOUR BUTTS AND BUY A BOOK!!!! I’VE GOT DENTAL BILLS TO PAY!!!

(Just kidding, you don’t need to buy a book……..although, would it be such a bad thing if you did?)

We heard back from Philly and they are very pleased with Zachary’s blood counts. They want him back up there for testing the week of 10/6, so he and Rebecca will be flying up Sunday afternoon (a week from today) and then they come home Friday evening, after doing testing all week.

Zachary is pretty adamant that he does NOT want any oral chemo that is a liquid. (That would be the CEP-701.) He also doesn’t want to do any traditional chemo (I.V.), which leaves us will very few if any options. We don’t know if the Millennium drug is available yet, and we don’t know if he is eligible for the powdered Fenretinide therapy. With me being at work that week, and Rebecca up there with a combative Zachary in Philly trying to make heads or tails of everything, it should prove to be a challenging five days. (I’m thinking that it might turn out to be a good time for me take up a new hobby, liking drinking hard liquor, or at least wine coolers.)

My other drama for the week is another in a long line of pitiful examples of just how inept I can be.

I was online the other night, doing NOTHING constructive, and I decided to Google my name. I immediately found some links to quotes of mine from when we were in the middle of the law suit. I also found a link for my book, and a couple of other obscure links that weren’t interesting. There was one though, that caught my eye immediately. The tag line read:

“Visit Scott Finestone’s Facebook page.”

Hmmmmmm….very curious indeed….I don’t remember making a Facebook page. So, I clicked on the link and what did I find you ask? A Facebook page for a Scott Finestone who resides in Vancouver, Canada. Since I’ve never been to Vancouver, Canada, and the photo on the page looked nothing like me, I was able to ascertain that this person was a DIFFERENT Scott Finestone than me! (I’m pretty smart that way.)

Having never heard of another Scott Finestone, I decided to send him a message, to introduce myself. I clicked on the “send a message” link, and immediately I was informed that I needed my OWN Facebook page in order to accomplish that task. So I figured, what can go wrong? I went through the motions of creating a page, and I wasn’t really paying attention to what was going on. The first thing that I encountered was a message informing me that I had almost 20 people who wanted me to be their friend. I don’t know how that works, but it seemed like they had somehow entered my email into their Facebook system, so as soon as I created my page, it “knew” to notify me, and them, that I was onboard. That seemed harmless enough, but the fatal error occurred when I got a message asking if I wanted to notify a particular group of people about my page. Had I being paying attention, I would have noticed that the group of people who they were referring to was…….(wait for it….you know what’s coming….) MY ENTIRE EMAIL DIRECTORY!!!!!

I started getting emails from people who I haven’t spoken with in years. A few of Zachary’s teachers responded with, “We’re not allowed to use Facebook while at school, thank you for the invite though.” (How embarrassing?) Doctors, nurses, insurance providers……the list goes on and on and on and on. You name it, they got a message.

I had people writing on my wall……(I DIDN’T EVEN KNOW THAT I HAD A WALL.) I was being linked to new friends who I had never heard of, just because we listed the same city as our home town.

I know there are many folks out there who are loyal Facebook users, and I don’t want to offend anyone, so let’s just say for now that I am too busy with work to stay 100% up to date on the whole Facebook thing. I will try to check in and read the messages, but I can’t promise that I will know what in the world I’m doing on there for quite some time.

So, if you received an email from us inviting you to join Facebook or to accept us a friend on Facebook, I apologize for any inconvenience this may of caused you…….it was NOT intentional!

Scott (The inept one in Jensen Beach, NOT the other one in Vancouver.)

Hospital Information:

Home
650 NE Lima Vias
Jensen Beach, FL 34957
Unlisted

Links:

E-mail Author: srfinestone@hotmail.com

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