5 in 11

It's just past noon here and boy, it's been quite a morning! What day is it anyway?

In the past 11 days that we have been here, five of them have been days of withholding food and drink...do I sound like a broken record yet?!? Today was another one of those days.

Nate didn't have a good sleep yesterday. He was awake and pretty restless until 3:30am. Don and I finally gave in after 2 and had to sleep - Don went to the hotel and I found a spot here at the hospital. I went back to the ICU at 6am, and he was already awake. Asking for num nums. He wanted food so bad. He began getting extremely upset and agitated, just crying out for food. His chest x-ray was at 6:20, and he just didn't settle after that. There was nothing I could do, no comfort he would accept. The doc came in and could see that this situation was pretty difficult for me and said she could give him some chloral hydrate, a sedative, to try and get him through to the appointment for his picc line at 9. We've had that before, and sometimes Nate fights it so much and it takes a while for it to kick in. That was the case - he didn't calm down. Don got to the room at 7am and I decided it would be OK if I left. As it turn out, he did settle about 5 minutes after I left!



I went to the hotel to sleep a for a few hours, knowing Don was with Nate, and Nate would be in radiology for up to 2 hours anyway. The picc is now in, it only took about an hour, but they did put him completely under for this, just to be safe. He woke up hungry and again, I delighted in feeding him lunch!! He's groggy from the meds and hopefully he can sleep some of it off, and not be too upset or in discomfort. He's totally off pain meds right now, and we are just giving them as needed for now.



He'll have another echo tomorrow to see how his ventricle is pumping - if it's function is where it needs to be with the help of the dopamine, they will take him off the dopamine, and repeat the echo the next day to see if the venticle is pumping the way it was when it had the dopamine in him. That's what the next few days will be like!



Good news is they once again took out the catheter, but the good news is he has since peed!!!



If any of you know Nate's habits, you know his comfort zone is found by putting his arm up my sleeve cuff and kind of rubbing and holding my arm. Now he's got both arms 'tied' up with stabalizing boards and it makes it tricky to fit that whole set up into my sleeve!! But it's not stopping our dear Nate, he's already tried working his way just past my wrist a little bit! I'm so glad he can still find that comfort!



I'm going to go see how the little guy is doing now. Our nurse found an Elmo movie, so hopefully that has made him a little happier now!