Well, Bruce Williams let us know that the chances are that Meltdown's
bleeding is from her heart failure.  Her heart's just so far gone that the
blood is pooling in her intestines and is then pushed through and out.  It's
stopped for now, and fortunately she is not hurting.  Bruce says that her
Lasix needs to go up to the maximum if she'll tolerate it, and she should
have Carafate in place of the Pepto, and have amoxi.  At this point we're
very obviously (no matter how much we tried to hide from the reality) just
trying to keep her as comfortable and happy as possible for her last hours
or days.  We looked for her earliest cardiomyopathy records but only have
them from 3/28/96 when she was already on Propranolol and Enacard (before
the Digoxin and Enacard turned out to work better for her ventricular
bigemini) so she must have been diagnosed around a week before.  She got
through 9 months of cardiomyopathy while having a complication which could
have killed her at any time, and she did it with style and joy; she's a
grand old lady, and we'll miss her dearly when she goes.
 
Kiss your fuzzies for us.
 
Sukie
[Posted in FML issue 1799]