Wednesday, May 27th

This morning was a rough one. When my mom and I arrived on 7th floor at about 9:00 a.m., Dad's nurse told us that his temperature had risen all the way up to 40.2 degrees centigrade, or 104.4 degrees fahrenheit with Tylenol. The medical staff countered this by placing a water-cooled blanked underneath Dad's covers to help lower his core body temperature. It worked well and by the end of the afternoon he was back down to 98.8 degrees. Dr. Klesney-Tait decided to take Dad off of all his antibiotics except for the one fighting off the Uriaplasma infection in his back. Once again he was very drowsy and fairly unresponsive when we first got to the hospital, but once the temperature began to regress and the afternoon wore on, he was wide awake. At this point he decided he wanted to watch one of his DVD's of an Eric Clapton concert. Shortly after this, however, he began complaining about a constant pain in his lower abdomen and explained to us that he felt like he had to urinate, but was unable to. His nurse checked his urine sample and said that something didn't look right in it, so she sent it in to be tested for an infection. So at this point, we are waiting for that sample to culture, as a urinary or bladder infection seems to be a strong possibility.