Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Feeding tube OK, Liver labs better, PICC better, 97 pounds

It's been a few days of waiting, but the news is encouraging...
Feeding tube fixed:
Monday Denise went to Huntington Hospital's radiology department so they could see what might be wrong with the feeding tube. Fortunately, it was just clogged again. They took care of the problem by pushing Coca-Cola into the tube until the acid ate away the clog. She used her walker to get from the parking lot to the office. As if that weren't impressive enough, she also wanted to visit Kidspace Museum and walked around there. We even were able to hold hands while Denise's caregiver carried the walker. The Taco Bell run didn't go very well. She threw up her slice of Mexican Pizza. I know, I know. Taco Bell isn't Mexican. And if it were, they'd have no business selling pizzas. Then she went back to the nursing home and did well overnight. We also found a cheaper version of ScandiShake (sprinkle-on calories) that tastes good and is helping Denise get some weight back.

Liver Enzymes heading back down to normal:
We found out today that Denise's liver numbers changed for the better, enzymes lowering considerably. She's still not as normal as she has been, but we're glad that the numbers are heading toward normal. Another liver lab blood draw will happen in a week.

CT Scan on deck:
There is a CT scan early tomorrow morning that will hopefully shed some light on what's going on. While we're optimistic that it won't reveal anything we didn't already know about, we'd still appreciate some pull from everyone on this one. We don't want anything new to show up, especially not anything majorly nasty.

Other neat things:
The PICC line insertion site is no longer red. We were worried about infection. Now it looks like there's not much to worry about there. Whew!
Denise had plenty of visitors over the long President's Day weekend, her parents among them.
Episodes of emesis have been declining again, and today Denise weighed in at 97 pounds.
Denise has been having a caregiver for twelve hours during the day, then doing nights alone, and it's been going fairly well. In fact, she said that it's been easier to get someone to help her at night than what it was during the day before the caregivers started coming. I guess that during the night, almost everyone's drugged up and asleep, so the staff, even though fewer of them, seem to respond faster to the call buttons. Go figure.
She won BINGO three times today. She keeps doing this. That's starting to scare me.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I wonder how many tears of happiness will be shed over this news. I for one have contributed. I continue to pray that stress will be relieved and carried away by the Holy Spirit.
God bless this family.

February 23, 2006 6:29 AM  

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