9:00 PM Monday, March 28, 2011

After I typed the time and date tonight, it reminded me of Star Trek when they start each episode by announcing the time logged on the ship's journey.  Today is kind of similar - very surreal and a long journey that feels far away from "home". 

Ed is pretty sick today.   His fever has not been at all cooperative since about noon - 102 to 103.5 consistently.  For the past 3 hours he has had to lay on a cooling blanket - a water filled pad that has a refrigeration unit at the end of his bed that circulates the water and keeps it chilled to 57 degrees.  He has one more hour to go - it was a necessary step in order to give him the blood transfusion that he needed - they can't infuse blood when his body temp is so high, so they are lowering it by cooling the room down and having him lay on the cooling "blanket".  I think he has finally fallen asleep from the sheer exhaustion of shivering so much.   It is very hard to watch him and resist the temptation to cover him with blankets and tuck him in to warm up.  He's only allowed a thin white sheet over him, which doesn't provide any warmth, just some cover from having the a/c blowing directly on him.  They have turned the thermostat in the room down by 6 degrees - I'm typing huddled under 3 blankets!

This staph infection if definitely kicking his butt.  As Dr. Menco said today, Ed is pretty fragile right now and it's a delicate balance of prioritizing the issues and getting each one corrected without creating another problem.  When the blood transfusion is finished tonight, they are starting him on PPN, which is a limited nutrition fluid that is not as substantial as TPN.  PPN can be given through an IV line, whereas TPN must be given through a central line (like a port or PICC line) because it tears up the veins too quickly because it's so irritating.  They may put in a temporary PICC line tomorrow afternoon just to get him back on the TPN but Dr. Mazur said they would probably not be able to leave it for long because it will quickly get contaminated with the staph as well.  On a good note, the platelets he got today seem to have helped with reducing the bleeding from the incision where the port was removed - with the platelets so low, his blood wasn't clotting properly.  Thank goodness for even small victories today.

I'm going to jump off the blog for tonight - just wanted to give you a quick update.  I will hopefully have more and better news tomorrow - in any event, I'll try and update you by noon.