Day Four - Post op and rest

Since last night Dan's BP has stabilized some and he's only on one BP medicine as of mid-morning. His head is still reduced in size since it's peak size, but they say it could get large again and that it's all normal, but eventually it will go down and be its normal size and shape.

 

Dan had a bit of a rough night last night, His blood pressure dropped - a normal process due to the surgery so they have him on two 'pressers that help to control his BP. They gave him a 3rd unit of blood during the night too. There are some signs of infection - that also makes sense with all the work they did on his skin during surgery. Again it sounds like this is all "normal" for someone in his condition - I remind myself again that he's in intensive care.

During morning rounds everyone (Lead Doctor, RNs, Charges, assistants, specialists and the Resident) gathers around outside Daniel's room and discuss his condition for 10-15 minutes. They go through a lot of "medicine talk" and while Dawn and I can understand a good part of what they are saying there's a learning curve with all the acronyms they routinely use. As they discuss his case we can ask just about any question and they explain further what's going on. (Our turn to stump the Dr.)

A moment of levity in all this: During these "rounds" Dr. B who we met yesterday seems to take particular interest in pushing the residents limits of their training and knowledge of internal medicine. If you've seen Scrubs think of Dr. Cox belittling J.D. and Elliot - asking them impossible questions. He stopped short of calling the resident "Nancy", but otherwise it's THAT awkward. Of course there's no humor in all this and they all are very serious, but I think you get what I mean.

Dan's dialysis machine was getting clogged. He was producing excess something that was clotting the machine so they added calcium & citrate to the blood that enters and exits the machine to help with that. The machine can filter out the citrate and re-add calcium back to his blood while it's cleaning his blood so it all works out. Right now as I type this the dialysis machine is off until a small team can assemble including some renal department folks to address the problem with the machine. I guess what I'm saying is that the problem is with the machine, not so much Daniel.

A little more detail about his breathing. Daniel is using an airway to breathe for him. He's doing what they call "riding the vent" as it's doing all the work for him. They explained it that this is by design and letting his body deal with other stuff - I mean all the skin is burned off his chest so he's got a lot of healing to do.

An RN just brushed his teeth. I was wondering about that - and yes they take care of every inch of him including his teeth. Of course it's not a normal tooth brush, this one sucks up all the stuff since with the airway going down his throat and a feeding tube in his nose he can't really swallow.

One of my best friends Jorge will be coming by after lunch to visit us. Until then we'll just hang out and admire Daniel in his quiet sleepy state.

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Final note to today:
Daniel has been mostly quiet today. He still moves around and his legs sometimes stretch and fall off the bed some. He definitely reacted when they grabbed a sample of fluid from his lungs. That seemed to be quite upsetting to him and we helped to calm and hold him down as his body reacted somewhat violently to the necessary task.

He gets his dressings changed routinely and while he got them replaced and cleaned this evening Dawn and I sneaked off to grab dinner - brought to us by Rimas and Larry again. We've had other friends come by our house today with meals - Malena - and they walked our dogs for us.

Later this evening I noticed that the food drip he's receiving contains casein which is a substance that doesn't sit well with Daniel so we pointed it out to the nurses and nutritionist so that they could correct it. They knew he was gluten-free, but somehow they missed that he was casein free too. It's not a huge problem for what happened, but the correction will be made for Daniel.
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I want to say how truly grateful Dawn and I are for how our friends and work family are supporting us with meals, dog walks and just taking the load off us. There's so many things in "normal" life from grocery shopping to taking care of chores and pets and all that you don't realize that those things still need to happen, but we're spending all our waking hours with our son Daniel as he works through this horrible experience. Life was extremely unfair to his guy this past Wednesday - no one should have to go through what's happened to him. Doing so and all the while having autism and no ability to talk makes it that much harder. Please keep him in your prayers.

The list is long and I'll say thank you now to anyone and everyone who have taken the time to read this story, or have gone above and beyond the call to help our family get through this event. So many of you to thank - WE LOVE HOW THE COLLECTIVE COMMUNITY HAVE COME TO HELP US. SO THANK YOU!!!