Today turned into a waiting game for Cannon. They removed the heavy sedative from his regimen, which left him with a light sedative and a painkiller. So for the entire day we had the priviledge of interacting with Cannon quite a bit since he wasn't so drugged up. He still had his eyes closed most of the time, but he opened his eyes when we called his name, and answered yes/no questions with a shake or nod. When he had problems and needed something, we told him to ask in a word or two and we would read his lips. This worked pretty well, we had some wins and losses here.
One reminder I'll put in here for myself: everyone is exhausted, everyone wants the best for Cannon, and everyone has a different idea of what's best. One good idea is for everyone to communicate together a general plan for how to deal with the patient. After 48 hours from surgery, I think we've found Cannon needs less stimulus. Everyone wants to provide the absolute best care for him and meet every single need. But he can't communicate. So this leads to a littany of questions from everyone; and they are just trying to find out what they need to do to help. I think this proved to be detrimental to Cannon's mental health, he became quite frustrated tonight and shut down a bit because every time his eyes opened he was being required to answer yes/no questions or respond in some way. If I was the patient, I'd be mad too. It has to be up to the folks that know the patient best to make this call.
Cannon's numbers are all looking good. His ventilator was put in a "test" mode today that requires Cannon to do all the breathing, with the ventilator as backup. This test was done last night and didn't go so hot. We did it again today at 4 and he did better. He did forget to breath for a while there and made the ventilator do some alarming, but he was told to take a deep breath. He did and everything got back on track. During the test his blood is drawn to see how his body is handling doing all the work, and all those tests came back good. We'll have to do this again at 2 AM, if that goes well we may be ready for the next step.
The atrial line is a sensor that goes directly into the heart and measures the pressure within. The next step is to remove this line. This is a risky, but standard, procedure. The line is simply pulled out of the heart (as I understand it). As it comes through the wall of the heart, there's potential for internal bleeding from the heart to the chest cavity. However, there's chest tubes to remove the excess blood from around the heart, and there will be blood available during the procedure to transfuse if necessary.
Once the atrial line comes out, if there's no leakage the chest tubes can come out since there won't be any more fluids to drain from the chest cavity. THEN the breathing tube can come out and Cannon can start to think about talking/eating/drinking. That'll be one fine day!!! Cannon is sick of his prison.
No comments:
Post a Comment