The progress continues

I made some changes at http://www.lamey-hughes.com/ If you didn't arrive by our home page, be sure to check it out once in a while.

I saw Mary at 10 and they let me stay until 11 when the patient in the next bed needed a procedure the nurse and doctor suggested I didn't want to be around while it happened. I headed for the hospital cafeteria and I'll hang here until the noon visit.

In spite of my complaints and large public following of this blog, Stanford has chosen to incur my wrath and not opened the coffee bar today either. I want my 'why bother.'

As for Mary, her sodium is normal. The renal docs stopped by while I was there and they are disengaging because she is nominal and stable. As to why it happened, it does with surgery sometimes. No firm cause. They will monitor but believe she is fine and on track.

And, Mary will be downgraded one level to the monitoring unit. You may recall she stopped there for a few hours before she was upgraded to full ICU. I don't think I've been so happy about a downgrade anytime in my life. It means her healing is continuing and she is getting better. The monitoring unit will be making her sit up and possibly walk so its deja vu all over again from Tuesday last week.

They changed the nutrient supplied by the feeding tube to better match her electrolyte needs. And, they have increase the volume over the last 24 hours from 10 units per hour to 30 and now it is at 40 units per hour.

Mary did eat a bit of the wonderful breakfast she recieved. Need I say that they delivered apple juice again? Of course, the nutritionist wrote it down to send cranberry or orange juice so the kitchen sends appled juice. Sometimes I wonder. Our wonderful ICU nurses have said they really don't know how to manage the kitchen, the vast majority of their patients don't eat and frequently cannot talk. The rest of breakfast was the same as dinner. Yummy!

Mary still has her fentanyl button so when she feels the pain, she hits that puppy. Its limited by a little computer controlled device so she cannot overdose.

I wish I could have taken a picture of her IV tree last night. The lights were turned down low in the room. There were some large number of bags and bottles hanging at the top of the tree. Then, there were, count them, six computer like thingys hanging on the tree, displays glowing with unintelligble information and managing the flow of all the fluids going into her IV or feeding tube. In the immediate background was the glowing LCD monitor with the bright multicolored tracks running across a black screen the screen displaying pulse in green, blood pressure in red, respiration rate in white, oxygenation in blue and one more thing I never understood. To the left of the tree was the nurse's computer with its various instruments hanging from it. All of these glowing, pulsing lighted devices were accompanied by the whirring and clicking sound of the pump driving the massage leggings Mary has been wearing this whole time. Starship Enterprise has nothing on a modern ICU unit.

I ate my breakfast while writing this. The breakfast food was unappealing (perhaps gross is an understatement) so I had a carne asada salad. Hey, it has a couple slices of beef, a dash of salsa, a few chips and a whole pile of chopped iceberg lettuce. Who says hospitals don't serve good food?

On my way for the noon visit. Hopefully they haven't moved here yet and I don't have to spend a lot of time finding her.

Ciao