Okay, so they did their varying scans from either end, and the upshot is they found a small something which they believe was the original source of the bleeding. They wouldn't have even thought to look if his blood thinner levels hadn't been roughly double what they were supposed to be. The surgeon wasn't too concerned, but they're taking the thing out on Friday and biopsying it anyway.
If there's one thing I learned from my medical transcription training, it's that growths/polyps on intestinal walls are fairly common. If there's something I learned from 2005, it's that when a surgeon isn't especially concerned about something scary, odds are in your favor that it's not as scary as it looks. So putting these two things together, I'm hopeful that, once again, 2008 will manage to be cruddy without being quite as terribly cruddy as it could be.
I went to see him this evening, as visiting hours at the hospital are apparently 24/7, and he looked much better than he looked at the ER... better, perhaps, than he'd looked for a while even before the ER.
Keepin' my fingers crossed... any extra positive energy ya got could be channeled his way, today...
Oh, on the med balance issue, it sounds like an impossible battle. They want him on blood thinners (as mentioned before) but they also want him on vitamin K for bone thinning, and vitamin K is what they gave him to promote clotting before his procedures. Dad asked the doctor, and sure enough, his meds are working against each other. I have no idea how they intend to resolve this, or if they intend to resolve it, but at least we're starting to figure out what the heck's going on with his all-over-the-chart levels.
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Vitamin K is also present in leafy green foods and, of course, vitamin supplements. Leafy greens being broccoli, kale, and the like. When Dan clotted after his first knee surgery, he became irate at the hospital for feeding him broccoli with every frellin' meal during his stay there, believing that it probably helped promote the clotting that nearly killed him.
In addition to that... things like fatty acids (fish oil) supplements will thin your blood. I discovered this when I - of all things - went in for a laser treatment on my skin and they told me to stop taking my essential fatty acid tablets, because they thin your blood and that could mean easy bruising with the laser treatment.
Garlic will also thin the blood - but according to the people at the blood level checking clinic thing we went to, it would have to be a "significant amount of garlic that any one person would not ever desire to eat" - however garlic supplements can affect it.
So get a list of all the supplements he is taking, and talk to the doctor about that.
In theory, they should be able to counteract the vitamin K with higher doses of coumadin, so long as he doesn't change his diet too drastically. When Dan went on coumadin for his last knee surgery they had him maintain his regular diet, and set his med level based on what he was already eating, rather than have him avoid vitamin K foods.
The funny thing is, they knew he was on these meds and told him to start eating more leafy greens. Two of his meds outright conflict - the pharmacist at Walgreen's seemed very concerned, and internet research confirmed the issues - and they explicitly warn against changing levels of leafy greens eaten while taking them; since Dad didn't eat much in the way of leafy greens before, he remains baffled how telling him to start eating them regularly fails to constitute a change. He has talked to his doctors, and all of them tell him to keep at his current regimen... or they did until this hit. Dunno what they'll say now - probably blame each other and prescribe more conflicting meds and supplements.
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