Pump (Heart Mate) acted up

Good Evening to All

 

If you remember from last night's post I wrote about my concern about her pump acting up.  Well that story continued this morning, Faye forgot to mention when the pump doctor was in this morning what we had seen her display screen doing.  Shortly after I arrived this morning the pump nurse walked in and I had been watching  the pump readings very closely, there was a spike in the current draw to 11 watts.  The normal range is usually from around 6 to 7.5 watts, so the nurse checked the history in the computer for the night and saw there had been a lot of these spikes towards morning, so she quickly called the pump doctor, he ordered blood work stat to find out whether her numbers were out of line.  Meanwhile he ordered heparin started again, a children's size aspirin, then he pushed up pump rpm's  from 9600 to around 13000 for a minute and then slowed it down momentarily to half that.  She can really feel it when the pump is speeded up like that, it's very uncomfortable.  The doctor set the pump at 9200 and with heparin running, after an hour or so the numbers all straightened out again.  They think a fibrin was forming on one of the vanes of the pump and starting to clot just a wee bit, although that is a puzzle her INR or blood thinness level was right, and all the other blood test results came back good.  To make a long story short, she missed out going down to the gym in the morning, in the early afternoon PT got her up into the wheelchair and she spent some time in the teen room.  Tonight there was a kid's bingo at the Beach on 4th floor, so we took her there, she won 2 small prizes.  She only napped for maybe a half hour today, so she was ready to sleep tonight, and so am I. 

 

Thanks again, Maynard