Monday ICU-Day 4

I got on the road after going to school to leave out sub plans. I got to the hospital around 10 so I could go in for the 11:00 visit. He had been bathed and in a new gown. All the tubes and wires..

The news wasn’t good. He wasn’t making much improvement and that damn ventilator was doing all the work. His infected blood cells were multiplying and the Xigris was working hard, but not sure if it would work.

His lung xrays were pitiful. double pneumonia with one lung more filled than the other.

And he was in the beginning stages of nicotine and alcohol detox. They had a banana bag going into one of the IV’s.

Later that day, they put in the central line. At least that reduced the number of tubes/IVs. A pic line is easy to get infected, though.

We were now living in the ICU waiting room. This would be our first night. In between visits and visiting the cafeteria, we managed to find places to put bags of clothes, books, incidentals, shoes, computers, cameras, magazines, etc. We each carved out a place for our stuff. We started a list of things we wanted—coffee mug, tape, paper. Stuff we take for granted.

We went to walgreens to pick up our scripts for Tamiflu that Dr. Middleton insisted we start taking. We bought an extra air mattress and 3 supersoft fuzzy fleece blankets. Who knew how much we would need those at that time?

When we went to dinner at the cafeteria, we seemed to have pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps a little more. We agreed that being forced to stick to small visits kept us from constatnly seeing him . .  . struggle. It looked like he was struggling to live or worse…not struggling with anything and the machines were doing to work.

That night, we blew up air mattresses, settled in, and slept the best we could. The night clerk for the front desk was wonderful to us. She warned us that the manager wouldn’t allow those air mattresses but she doesn’t come to the floor until after the 6 visit so make sure we have them deflated and hidden.  We learned that it’s best to be very respectful to the people who work there—desk clerk, cleaning lady, nurses, etc. They remember the nice ones and go the extra mile. Monica and I, being teachers, know that the school secretary is the real one who runs the school…and teachers want to be on her good side. Same thing with the front desk and cleaning lady. They are exceptionally nice people.

We were also introduced to Cruella DeNurse. She chewed Monica a new ass when she was trying to adjust her mask and pulled it down. The clear visor steams when we started crying and she was just trying to fix that. I saw Cruella scream at another nurse for not reading some stupid article. We told Mom about her and she told us to behave (big fat eyeroll here).