Day 12 Post Op

Day 12 - Monday Talk about being on pins and needles overnight and the next morning waiting to learn when C would have her cath. We had pretty much determined from everything we heard that this was no longer a question of if C would get a cath but when C would get a cath. The waiting is horrible but there is not much more to do when in the hospital. We go through rounds and everything is pretty much the same. C is still progressing but there will be no more changes until cath day and time is determined. So pacer is still connected even though she no longer needs pacer help. The iv amiodarone and milrinone stay. Obviously the pacer wires stay. The iv lasix is still on full force. However, they do decide to remove the trans thoracic line. Awesome news as that thing has been in for almost two weeks and with one line out of two clotted the thing is just sitting there acting as a possible breeding ground for infection and removing it b also means more moving around for C. One down side, they have to get very creative with C's pic line, the last remaining line, because her amiodarone cannot be mixed with lasix or one of the iv antibiotics that she is still on. So the nurses have to be very diligent about stopping the amio drip, flushing the line, running the lasix, flushing the line and then restarting the amio drip again. Gee, could you possibly give me anything else to worry about at this point? Now I an all freaked out the nurse will mess up and not keep them seperate and C will have a dangerous drug interaction. Freakin awesome. But our day nurse is fantastic and she has it all worked out and is able to give It to the night nurse. C tolerated the tube pull well and was a happy little thing when I saw her again. Even with the weird way her meds had to be run, I am always glad to see things disappear out of C and out of her room. Not too much later we got the call that C was scheduled for Tuesday at 11:30 to head to the cath lab. Well, guess we are doing this after all. Total terror. Poor C. Another procedure, more stopped feeds when we were just getting back into the swing of things and more anesthesia. Ugh. Her cath doctor did come by and talk with me in the afternoon. I could tell he was still hesitant but got out voted by the rest of the team. He is the one who has been dragging his feet trying to give her more time to adjust. However, he did say that he is just as concerned and perplexed as everyone else as to why her oxygen saturation is remaining so low even with oxygen on. He also said the risks are the same now as 2 months from now. I asked him about just letting her go home on oxygen and see how she does and he said if he could do something to avoid that then he would like to do so. The reason we had already waited so long on the cath compare to to what the other doctors wanted was because our cath doctor was on a mission trip to Jamaica the while last week. So, off to the cath lab Tuesday for C. I am continuing to get C up and walking 3 to 4 times a day. Now instead of wanting to go walk she wants to stay in bed and cries to get back in it. I am having nothing of that though and keep getting her up. I think she has figured out that she is not actually leaving and therefore has no desire to walk through the unit again and again. I would take her out of the unit except I fear she will never come back in. She is still tolerating her feeds and is pooping ljke a champ. Think she is making up for lost time. Kevin says again that the night is uneventful and she is getting more sleep at night. The monitor alarms and the pump alarms still freak her out though. Kevin has decided that he is going to invent some type of pump that will not alarm in the room but will alarm to the nurse directly. Considering the pumps generally are just letting the nurse know that a med or flush is done, sounds good to me. Maybe he will make us a bunch of money :-) Trying to get a decent night's sleep with a cath looming over our heads is near impossible.