Our nurse Melissa called to get the ’scripts to start Johnny’s chemo this morning and the Hem/Onc doc’s asked, “Where are the Romano’s? How come they aren’t on 9 yet?” Melissa found out there is indeed, a room on 9 for us and she has been working hard all morning to get us up there. She rocks.
Last night was uneventful — whew! Johnny ran a slight temp of 101.3 about 2am, and his oxygen levels dropped a bit too, possibly due to the fever, so he was put back on oxygen (02). When Melissa came in the morning she saw that he was on 02, hasn’t eaten in days and has the sniffles. She ordered him food (jello and chicken broth) and gave him orders to eat and walk around. She told the doctors that she feels the lack of food and walking could be the reason he needs 02 and that the sooner he gets out of here the better. She also asked for another xray just to make sure his lungs still look good.
The ID docs came by to give us the morning bacterial reports (my words, not theirs). They discussed the results of yesterdays ultrasound — there appears to be a mild thickening of the gall bladder and intestinal walls. This could be due to a few things — possibly a bacterial infection, but more than likely because of the antibiotics treating the infection and all of the vomiting and diareah the poor kid had this week. All cultures have come back clear of any infection, but because Johnny has been through so much this week, the doc’s are changing his antibiotics to drill down on the possibility of a gall bladder and intestinal wall infection. He did have a little diareha last night — but no vomiting.
His cultures and stool will continued to be monitored for bacteria, but nothing is expected to grow. His antibiotics will change to cover the possibility of gall bladder and intestinal wall infection, the new stuff is called zosyn and a broad spectrum antibiotic that he had before called gentamicin to kill anything else that could be floating around. The ID doc’s said they are “thrilled, amazed and in awe of Johnny’s strength and recovery.” I am so proud of the little guy too — really, there are no words to describe how grateful I am that he is as strong as he is. Slightly frightened of the ‘amazed and awe’ comments — but he really did make a remarkable recovery this week. I honestly think the doctor’s didn’t expect him to make it. It doesn’t get much scarier than that…
Right now he’s getting chemo (the trial drug epratuzamab) and resting comfortably. To make sure he doesn’t have a reaction like he did last week, he gets what I like to call his “Rush Limbaugh/Paula Abdul” premed cocktail; benadryl, hydrocortisone, tylenol and Demerol. It’s given about 20 minutes prior to chemo and he fought hard not to fall asleep. He said it makes his eye lids sleepy — not him — just the lid part of his eyes. I guess the cocktail is stronger than his eye lids because he’s out like a light right now.
I am praying for a very, very, very boring afternoon and I will update more when we get a room on 9.
RANDOM, SILLY, CRAZY THOUGHTS:
After a week of bad news I thought I had to put something funny in the blog:
We’ve been in ICU 4 days now and TV is the only thing we have going on. The other night as I was flipping through the stations for the millionth time, this photo kept popping up on random stations. It doesn’t get much sillier than this!
At first it frightened me — why does this guy have a bob? Why the carefully manscaped facial hair? Does this poor creature know the 80’s are over? Maybe he’s stuck inside the hospital TV?
Later, I was mad because I didn’t know who the hell this guy was and why he was so important that his photo had to be blasted across the airwaves taking up valuable cable space. Finally, his soft woman-like facial features lulled me to sleep. I woke up the next day, went channel surfing for our semi-famous photo but he was gone as quickly as he popped up. I’ve since tried to search for him, to no avail… which makes me think (hope) I was hallucinating or something from lack of sleep.
