Wednesday, May 20th

Hey everyone! Heidi decided to take a break from the posting so I guess you're all stuck with me for today's update. God forbid, the journalism major has to write a blog post! Haha. So anyway, here's what's new with my dad...

Last night the staff decided to take Dad off of dialysis to better measure if his kidneys were functioning correctly. So far, so good. The kidney specialist came in earlier today and said that the lab numbers on his kidneys looked very good even though he hasn't produced very much urine yet. Apparently it can take the kidneys a little bit of time to kick in after being on dialysis for such a long period of time. They also discussed giving him a dose of Lasix which assists in the flushing out of bodily fluids; kind of like a laxitive for your bladder. Dad's throat is still sore, and understandibly so. He is constantly wanting water to soothe it, however we are still not allowed to give him anything until he gets the trache removed and the doctors feel he is ready to pass a swallow test. Throughout this entire journey, he still hasn't lost his attitude. When we told him today that he couldn't have a drink yet, he replied my mouthing, "bull***t." He's much more like himself today and his eyes are even less glazed over than they were yesterday. You can tell by his expressions that he's sick of laying around and being sick when he has these new lungs to use! Dad still has a low-grade temperature of about 100 degrees today and now that they have the PICC and dialysis lines out, those don't seem to be the source of the infection. His head doctor, Dr. Klesney-Tait said that they're just going to wait things out with the temperature and keep giving him antibiotics and Tylenol. Another thing to note was that for a span of about a half hour they took him off the ventilator and put him on regular oxygen, but his oxygen saturation numbers dropped too much too keep him off it any longer. He's not using the ventilator very much, but he's not ready to go off it quite yet. Dr. Klesney-Tait also spoke earlier today about possibly sitting him up in a chair today, but that's something that we will update you on again tomorrow. So far things are looking up, but it's still a long road ahead for my dad.

Jason