Back to the SICU

It's hard to believe how this whole ordeal lurches back and forth and up and down. I was about to post an entry yesterday afternoon which would have been a very positive one. At that time, Dad was still in the Intermediate Care Unit and his ventilator settings had been turned down in the morning to where he was initiating every breath and the ventilator was just supporting him. They had also discovered why he has to keep receiving blood every day. He has some sort of virus (I haven't been able to get the name yet) which is causing the problem and they have started treating it.

Unfortunately, that is the only good news from what happened yesterday. When the care team took an x-ray of Dad's chest, it looked like there was a bunch of mucus stuck in his lungs. They decided to send him back to the SICU so that he could again receive one-on-one care from a nurse and hopefully prevent it from happening again. In order to get out the mucus that was already down there, the doctors decided to use a scope and clean it out. However, when they got down there, they didn't find any mucus. Instead they found that his lungs were again inflamed, bloody and had deflated – especially the right side. So, they had to turn the ventilator settings way back up in order to inflate the lungs again.

One of the SICU doctors took Mom outside of Dad's room and just told her straight up what was going on. He said that while Dad did come close to dying several times in the first couple of weeks and got better, even though none of them expected him to, things again don't look good. The doctor said that most of the time when individuals have been on a ventilator for so long, with so little progress toward getting off of it, it usually means that they never will. He also mentioned Dad's kidneys again, and how they are basically not functioning at all and that they will continue to have to put him on dialysis every other day. Then he got right to the heart of it and said that there is a good chance he will never get to go home again – in fact they may never be able to get him to the point where he can even go to Promise, the long-term acute care facility. This doesn't mean that Dad is going to die in the next couple of days, but it's definitely not the kind of news we were hoping for.

Mom has asked that only Dad's immediate family (kids, siblings and Aunt Jill) come to visit for the next few days due to this setback. The whole family wants to again thank everyone for your continued love and support. It means more to us than any of you will ever know. I'll post again when there is any significant change.

P.S. I almost forgot, here are a couple of pictures Dad wanted Mom to take and have posted on the blog.

Dad wanted to make sure everyone could see him with his trach. :-)

This is Dad's every-other-day dialysis machine.