"I wanna go home!"

Not me, actually, but rather my father, who is getting some cabin fever after having been here for 5 days. I am sitting in the corner of the hospital room and my father is struggling into a t-shirt. He doesn't want to get up and move around but he still wants to be released. And then he wants to go to the office on Monday. And then he wants to fly to Geneva next week. He's on antibiotics for the next two weeks, so we might be able to convince him to stay put.

So, where are we today? They extracted 3 litres of fluid from his abdomen but he is still incredibly bloated (like pregnant bloated). The initial tests show a high number of white blood cells in the fluid, which suggests the presence of an infection (possibly now gone). This is good, believe it or not, because it means that he could be feeling so crappy due to the infection rather than because he is dying.

However, an ultrasound yesterday revealed that his portal vein is partially blocked, which means that this is going to keep happening if they don't find a way to solve it: he will keep retaining fluid and losing albumin and feeling crappy. We have to wait for his regular oncologist to come back from holiday to investigate options. It's not a very good state to be in,though, so we are waiting to find out what will be going on.

Further, we are waiting to hear about what else they find in the fluid from his abdomen. They are looking for cancer cells, which would be the equivalent of a further metastasis. This would be bad. Worse, in fact, than the other stuff. So we wait, again.

I keep trying to fly home. It was supposed to be Wednesday. Then it was Friday. Now it's Saturday. But we are waiting for my father to be released from the damn hospital. I also have a deal with him that he will cooperate with the nurse that they are hiring in to help and do his best to get some exercise, as it make him feel better. I am writing it here as a testament that we made this deal, because he promised. His health depends on this.