Sorry for not posting last night, but Andrea crashed yesterday and the decision to move her down to CVICU was made in the evening to move her down there when they discovered her blood numbers were way out. Some values were 10 times higher than normal and a few critical ones were very high also. I have reported how she was struggling with her feeds, a lot of nausea and stomach pain, well yesterday morning after a bad night previously it got much worse, her violent retching and gagging seemed to come out of depths unknown. It got so bad she was moaning and groaning and crying, saying she did not see how she could live like this. Finally they gave her 5 mg of morphine and it still took over an hour before it took effect and she fell asleep. Even then she moaned and groaned in her sleep, tossing and turning, but managed to sleep most of the afternoon. They came to draw blood from her pic line in her arm and soon had the results which were so unbelieveable that they pulled a sample from her perma cath for doing dialysis, same results. Then the doctor ordered a poke in the arm from a new site thinking the first 2 might be somewhat contaminated from running medications through them, but results the same. Then they got worried and moved her down to the CVICU around 9:30 PM and started her on an number of different medications to restore the electrolyte balance etc. By around 3 AM the numbers had improved a lot, she had a CT scan without the contrast dye and was on continual dialysis. We finally left her room around 3:30 AM and went back to her room on the ward and managed to sleep a few hours. She did not sleep more than an hour all night the nurse told us in the morning. Miraculously her pain had mostly disappeared by the evening and when her pump doctor came in he said with those kind of numbers she should be much sicker, and he could hardly believe her pain and nausea were almost gone. This morning she had an abdominal ultrasound but they could not find anything unusual. The CT scan also did not show anything either. The only conclusion they can reach is that her pump must have had a clot in it that had moved to her liver maybe partially blocking it or something, causing her the intense pain and her blood values to shoot sky high. Appaarently a clot can form in a place in the pump where the rotor does not touch it so it spins merrily on and the computer screen really does not show a severe power spike or the flow per minute numbers change much, yet the body is deprived of circulation causing pain. The interesting thing is that today she began to ask to drink which is very unusual the last weeks, we could hardly tempt her with anything at all to drink, she just was not interested. Now today it seemed she could hardly get enough fluids and without nausea, to satisfy her cravings which is a very good sign. When we left to come back here for night she was nearly asleep and resting peacefully. O yes this evening she had another CT scan using contrast dye which gives a much better clearer image since it shows up everything better, the intensivist just wanted to be sure there was nothing being missed. The results of that seemed good also. Now it is time to sleep as we have hardly slept at all the last 40 hours or so. Goodnight.
Thanks, Maynard
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