The Adventure Continues

Kevin is at UCSF Medical Center now and around 1am last night they began the process of cleaning his blood. He ended up being transported by ambulance driven by an old friend Pam McClean whom some of you from Paso First Ward may remember. I used to work for her and her husband Kevin before serving a mission doing landscape maintenance.

This is a photo Hillary took with her phone of the ambulance crew getting Kevin onto the gurney. I believe that is Pam in the upper right. Many thanks to her and her colleagues.

There had been a bit of trouble making the travel arrangements for Kevin yesterday and there was somewhat of a long delay which is why his treatment didn't begin until after 1am. We must give our thanks to Susan (I don't have a last name yet) who is our case manager. She began to work very hard to ensure Kevin would be taken care of. In fact she had begun working for us some time before we even knew that we needed her. Without her help Kevin might still be here and in desperate need of treatment. She may well have saved his life yesterday.

So now his blood is being cleaned and that process should take around fourteen hours to complete. Much quicker than we had anticipated and so we should be seeing some real progress within a days time. They are also giving him simultaneous blood transfusions to make sure he has enough clean blood running through his veins and dialysis to keep his kidneys healthy so that they are in top shape for the hard chemo treatments he will eventually be taking.

The doctors say that at the moment he is doing well, although he has been a little delirious. As you can imagine there are a great many machines in his room what with the three different treatments taking place with all their own machines in addition to all the monitoring systems. Hillary told me this morning that when they had arrived he was saying things like "are they trying to get me to buy all this stuff?" and "everywhere you go they try to sell you stuff?" so he is a little out of it but at least he has some awareness of what's around him.

Hillary has also been taking several photos and once they all return here we will be sharing those with you. His doctors have been very good about keeping them informed about his progress and condition, calling them regularly as they were out in their hotel room. They are currently with him in his room at the UCSF Medical Center. So as the info comes in I will keep everyone posted as long as I can be in town to do it.

Darrell