Wednesday, August 14, 2002

Oreta redux.

We are still in a holding pattern here. The fourth CT scan shows no change. No new hemmorhages (good); no increase in the two known ones (also good); and no decrease either (not so good, but not bad either. Expected.).

He still has the visual impairments. Basically he can't see anything on his right side -- the eyes function but the brain is not processing the information. There is a fair amount of aphasia, which is a fancy term for difficulty in understanding and using words.

The hospital is "weaning" him off the iv cocktail of cardiac medicines they have him on. They want him on oral medicines and skin patches so that he can be moved out of ICU onto the regular medical floor. That part of the process is doing nicely, but I have slightly mixed feelings about it. I will be very grateful that he is well enough, but frankly, I've been spoiled by the quality and quantity of the nurses here in ICU at Crawford Long. The regular floor nurses have many, many more patients so they don't have time to do the kinds of things the ICU nurses do. His day nurse has been adjusting his medications in little increments constantly, playing around with all the different ones to get his pulse and blood pressure exactly where the doctors want it. There appears to be as much art as science to this. Eye of beta-blocker and toe of calcium-channel blocker...Wool of nitro and tongue of esmolol.....

Other than that, it's a waiting game.

Thank you, all of you, for your messages. I've been reading them to Daniel and I'm sure he is grateful for them also.

Oreta