Day 33 - Graft update

Daniel was awake when we arrived this morning. He had a fever last night and one of his wound cultures showed an infection so he's back on two antibiotics. By morning his fever was back to normal. He had a good night sleeping from what we heard.

Jamie visited this morning so we went to work with the doctor's support to get Daniel moving. We decided to get him upright in his bed because we was going to head off to wound care soon. We agreed during morning rounds that we might be able to have him walk to the tub room for wound care, but his pain meds they give to prepare for wound care (where they wash and scrub off his burn areas, remove any dead skin and redress him) kicked in and he was seriously nodding off sitting upright. This cleaning was more thorough now that they could wash around his new grafts so that also means more pain, more meds to control it and more overall exhaustion from the ordeal.

At least we got him upright and did some light stretching. Even though it's not much of a "workout", it tires him out. He was able to bend his arms much better this time and only moaned once during the effort so I would say he was much better today, but of course we know how well he likes to work with Jamie.

Daniel was moved to the tub bed and wheeled off to the tub room. We were anxious to hear how things would go because his surgeon Dr. Wi. was going to remove his bolster and take the first look at his graft on his neck. After about an hour Dr. Wi. emerged all smiles and said all the grafts "took" and his face, chin and neck looked great. There's a bit of skin at the edges by either shoulder that have to be "repaired", but otherwise it's fantastic news. So a couple more grafts and Daniel will have all his skin back!
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We have to wait for Daniel's skin on his legs to heal up, but they are getting close to being ready. Maybe by Wednesday or Thursday he will be ready for his anterior torso to be grafted. That's a lot of skin to cover, but it would only leave his back to be grafted.

We wanted to try to get Daniel sitting up again in his bed for a little while. More is better right? For various reasons Daniel made it pretty clear after only five minutes that he was VERY uncomfortable and that we needed to get him back down.

We're learning that his progress will be slow - that's the way burn recovery works. Very slight changes in position can alter things a lot. Blood will rush to his feet if he's sitting more upright causing swelling for instance. It can change his heart rate which can alter his temperature and blood pressure.

Any way... we got Daniel re-positioned back to his preferred position and his heart rate went back down to a more normal rate (for a burn patient his age at this point in his recovery that's in the 120's). He calmed down and has now fallen asleep. He seems a lot more comfortable!