I read over the last post to refresh myself and the last line was "We'll see what tomorrow brings". Well, tomorrow (yesterday) brought misery.

Breakfast came shortly after I got there and Bill was so scrunched down in the bed there was no way he could attempt to eat. He didn't want to get into his chair but Horace and Caleb teamed up on him and got him up. He pretty much sat and looked at his tray. There was not an overwhelming amount of food, egg, sausage patty, toast, pears.  There was also a carton of milk and a cup of coffee. Since they had forgotten, again, his Glucerna, I got his last one from the fridge. He drank all of his coffee, all of the Glucerna, ate 2 bites of egg and nothing else. I don't even think he drank his milk. He even went so far as to try to cough hard enough to throw up. He keeps complaining that his stomach hurts all the time, but when they check and probe the answers are all no to where the pain is. I think, and again what do I know I'm just a wife, that his stomach is cramping because he's HUNGRY!

I talked to the dietician and she said she was going to look at all of us numbers, weight, and food that he had eaten and she may go ahead and order a couple of cans of food for bolus feedings through the peg tube. If was for this very reason we decided not to have it removed when he did start eating again in the spring. He's not too keen on the idea, which led to an argument. It seemed like that is all that we did yesterday.

He complained the entire time he sat in his chair (2 hours) that he hurt everywhere and needed to lay down. He's hurting because he is laying down all the time.

Dr. Threlkeld asked if they had done a chest x-ray over the week-end. He thought they had and I told him to my knowledge they had not so he said he would check. He said nothing grew from the sputum sample they finally got and it was mostly saliva. Cindy also asked about a chest xray and said she would check. Chandra was with her with was surprising. She's the one that said he's technically not their patient. 

Bill refused to work with physical therapy, which led to more strong words from me. I hate having to be what some would consider mean to him, but that seems to be what he understands. I told him if he was just going to stay in bed all the time, he would either go straight to a nursing home forever, or we would just have to get a hospital bed for him. Didn't make much difference to him either way.

I ordered him a bowl of soup and a sandwich for lunch hoping that would entice him some. It was his favorite lunch soup...tomato with a ham sandwich. I cut the sandwich in half and said he needed to eat at least one half of it. He did eat most of the soup, took little nibbles from the bread of the sandwich, but no meat and drank his Glucerna. He also ate all of his pudding.

When the lung nurses came in they asked if he had gone for his chest CT yet! We didn't even know one had been ordered! They said that Dr. Edwards had ordered it, I guess on Cindy's suggestion after she listened to him. His nurse then came in and said that because his blood pressure was staying below 100 all of a sudden, they needed to hang a bag of fluids. They just got that done when they came to get him for the CT. The nurses who brought him back were a little panicked because his sats had dropped to the upper 70s/low 80s. But, he had been flat on his back which he hates, and it makes it harder to breathe, especially with compromised lungs. He was also on regular oxygen and he's still been on the high flow. But, once he got back into his bed and then on the other oxygen, his numbers came up.

The fluids worked and his blood pressure came up, which leads me to believe that even though he is drinking everything in sight, they are pulling too much fluid somehow. I don't know where it is going because he's not peeing much. But, he's on a high dose of Lasix to reduce the fluid in his lungs. 

He seemed to be a little perkier after that which seems to confirm that he was dry. He ate almost 1/2 of a 1/2 of a piece of lasgna (if that makes any sense). He also drank his shake. I'm usually not there when dinner comes and wouldn't have been there yesterday, but I was hoping we'd get the results of the CT. I left at 6 finally, with a horrible headache, just from stress, and we still didn't know. His nurse said that since Dr. Edwards doesn't round until evening that we would have the results in the morning. Of course I will then have to ask for them when I get there or I won't know them at all.

I suspect that it is pneumonia again. He has been off the antibiotics about 3 days and his white count had started creeping up a couple of days before. I think also that since they are letting him eat nearly laying down in bed that he is aspirating. I know he choked on a bite of lasgna last night, but I think he got it coughed up.

So, it was not a good day yesterday. It was also the anniversary of his crash last year that started our 45 day ICU journey. I don't know why that hit me all of a sudden yesterday morning, but it slammed into my head at one point.

I've got to get moving. I need to get gas this morning and need to look out the window to see if the car is frosty and needs warming while I'm getting dressed. It's really cold this morning, 31 right now, so it's dropped a degree since I got up an hour ago.

I think I'm going to try to take this today. I need to finish paying the bills. The internet has been a little better but I may just turn my phone into a hotspot and work that way. I can also update this as needed.

Let's hope that it's a better day today!