10 Days later

Its has been 10 days since David was admitted to the hospital from the 3rd time since Christmas. January has just disappeared out from under me.

David isn't much better. His pneumonia looks the same on the chest Xray as it did on the day he was admitted. He has been on very high doses of very strong antibiotics for over 21 days now. The doctors said if they haven't worked by now, the won't work. He is having a lot of pain and is on morphine every 2-4 hours. We are very thankful that he is able to have pain relief now.

Monday was hell. A lot of pain for David, a nurse was bad at her job, and no communication were not a good combination. David didn't get pain relief for about 5 hours after he began to get pain. He had to get an ultrasound and a new IV during this episode. It was terrible. David was also on a drug called heparin, which is a blood thinner (we are not really sure how he ended up on this, it just sort of happened) which made him bruise badly. So when the nurse tried to start an IV, the vein blew and caused a bad bleed under his skin and while I was trying to put pressure on it to stop the bleeding, I ended up bruising the other side of his arm just as bad. It was a VERY HARD DAY. I started crying and finally after 3.5 hours of asking, David got some pain medication. My mom (who has been a nurse for 30 years) was finally able to get off work and come in. Lets just say that she took care of some things, established her authority, got the nurses and doctor back in line, and put some "New Rules" in place. I have NEVER seen my mom so upset and so in charge before.

Things have been much better since then! The nurses have figured out that my mom has been a nurse for as long time and she isn't going to take the excuses that others do. We actually get a nurse when we push the call light, and get pain meds as soon as David starts to display signs of pain.

Yesterday marked the end of "the nonsense." From now on, David will only be getting pain medication, his feedings and his current medications. My mom and dad had a very productive "phone conference" and decided that no more antibiotics was the route to go for David. This is the best thing for all of us. His body can't take much more and honestly neither can we. He will be followed by his regular doctor next Tuesday and get some blood work to check on the infection. Depending on how things look with the infection, we will hopefully be seeing an orthopedic doctor about his hip pain. His left hip has been dislocated for years and now its causing him a lot of pain. All we want is for David to be as pain free as possible.

Looks like we will be going day to day from here on out. We might get to enroll in a hospice program when we see the doctor on Tuesday. That would be nice.