my dad - part II

My dad was moved from ICU late last night, around 1am. Apparently his room was needed for someone else who is more sick (if you can imagine!). While I suppose it's good that they felt he wasn't critical enough to stay in ICU, I still hope he wasn't moved too soon. With the exception of a couple nurses on that ward, I found them to all be quite passive with his care... content to just wait and see what happens without being proactive in trying to make him better. Luckily he will be back under the care of Dr. Duffy, who was the one to remove a lot of the meds that we felt were adversely affecting him and to suggest dialysis.

Although dad's blood pressure has gone up on it's own, his white blood cell count has also risen (from 11 to 28), indicating some other sort of infection. This time it's Enterococcus and he's being treated with the antibiotic ampicilin. Mom said that they told her that the Enterococcus bacteria is NOT the 'E' in VRE, but that's not what I just read.

"Enterococci are intrinsically resistant to B-lactam-based antibiotics (ie, some penicillins). In the last two decades, particularily virulent strains of Enterococcus which are resistant to vancomycin (Vancomycin-resistant entercoccus, or VRE have emerged in nosocomial infections of hospitalized patients especially in the US."

So someone didn't know what they were talking about. A less than comforting sign...

The infection is in his septum, although I'll have to get clarification on that... it could be his nose, his brain... we have "septums" all over our body since septum just means a separating membrane.

So if it's not one, it's another. He's so sick. All these little infections that a healthy person would easily fight off are a mountain to him.

The nurse did say that he pulled out the feeding tube that was going down his throat sometime last night or this morning. I can't imagine that it was too comfortable, but it was helping him get some extra nutrition. The nurse said he was very adamant that he didn't want it back in, so hopefully they'll be able to use the threat of it to get him eating more.

It's hard not being there to visit with him and see for myself how he's doing. The ICU nurses were so good about giving me updates and keeping me informed since they're used to family calling up for information... the nurses on the regular ward act like I'm bothering them! I'm worried that he's not going to receive the care he really needs there.

At times it seems so unlikely -impossible even- that he'll ever leave the hospital (or some other full care medical facility) because he's SO sick and the recovery seems SO daunting, but at the same time I don't know why God would have had him go through so much this year and let him get SO CLOSE to death without having a plan for him - a plan other than lying in a hospital bed for the rest of his life. He just has so much healing to do.

Please keep praying.