James (Jim) LaVine Jim LaVine

Welcome to our CaringBridge website. We are using it to keep family and friends updated in one place. We appreciate your support and words of hope and encouragement. Thank you for visiting.   This whole thing has come about so quickly I'm in somewhat of a fog.   To fill you in, with my apologies to those who have heard this, Jim felt fine until mid July when his INR (a measure of how thin his blood is because he was on coumadin) went whacky and he developed jaundice very rapidly.   He had lost a lot of weight but we had attributed that to his starting to take Ozempic which, if you've watched the commercials, says it will cause a patient to do that so we weren't overly concerned.   He had an ultrasound and CT scan of his liver/gall bladder area and on Friday, July 31, when he went to see a gastroenterologist he put him immediately into the hospital where he sat until the following Monday and Tuesday when they did procedures to put a shunt into his bile duct that was completely blocked as well as a temporary external shunt.   He was in the hospital until Thursday when he came home and was able to see us (Craig, Britni and I) for the first time in a week.  That night he got up to use the bathroom without waking me up and fell...long story short, he became unresponsive about an hour later and I had to call 911.  He's been back in the hospital since then and had a procedure done yesterday and another today.   The diagnosis is cancer of the bile duct and one of the worst things is I can't be there with him.   I spend my days here alternately trying to keep busy and crying.....we are thankful that we were able to get moved in and settled in our new house that is only twenty minutes from Craig and Britni and they have been my rock through this whole thing.  I am new to this site so will attempt now to get the word out to y'all can log in and read this and, hopefully, keep praying for "Big Jim"......someone sent me a virtual hug today and I had to smile remembering the literally hundreds of Hug Coupons he handed out over the last years!