Mom's Friday update

There was really not a lot of change in Richard's condition today, but Dr. Shear says he is improving. They have his oxygen support at 35%, which must be an improvement, and he is not very sedated. They started him on lasix again and he has had a good bit of output, but is still very swollen. His blood pressure was somewhat lowered but higher than ideal--I remember 148 as an upper number.

Katie and Sarah were both there for the 12:30 visit and Amy joined us by 2:30. At that time Dr. Shear came in and spent a long time talking to us about Dad's condition, giving us a good summary. He said they had done CAT scans of his chest, abdomen and pelvic regions and they all looked pretty normal, except for his lungs, of course. As we have said there are no blockages or embolisms, and his blood chemistry showed that there was no heart attack. He is puzzled about what caused the heart failure and said they have ruled out the usual causes--probably not aspiration, no embolism, and he said no MRSA, which was the bacteria he had in the CICU. He said that sometimes they can't figure out the cause of a problem, but as long as it heals up and goes away they have to be satisfied. He would like to know the cause, just as I would, because what is to prevent it happening again?

His stomach is healing up nicely. He said there was actually stomach tissue growing along the fistula, so I guess it had become part of the stomach and would never have healed up on its own.

He is concerned that stuff is not moving down out of the stomach. He says if there is a mechanical problem he could probably fix it with further surgery, but nobody wants to do that! He is hoping it will resume functioning on its own, but at the moment most of what is coming out of his stomach is coming out the ng tube. There is some bile in it, which I think he said indicated some movement from the abdomen.

He still wants to do a GI test and said he will schedule it for tomorrow.