Morning Update 1

I realized that there should probably be two morning updates, at least to the extent possible. A wrap-up of the overnight and then the doctor's rounds, at least if anything comes up.

Forgive me if any of these thoughts seem disconnected, I got about two hours of sleep and am starting to slow down in the head...

Summary
Jon (me) spent the night, everything went pretty well. From midnight to 1:00am (until I fell asleep) the vitals were just about perfect. TJ's sats fell to a low of 84 (bad) around 3:30am and his fever started rising. To counter this, the percentage of oxygen going through the ventilator was turned back up to 75 (it had gotten down to 60 again yesterday evening) and the cooling jacket* (called a cold jacket in the last post). TJ also got another chest x-ray around 5:15, but it will be partly obscured by the jacket.

Finally, they turned off the food going down the ng tube slightly before midnight. The reason they put off the TEE from yesterday to today was because he needed to be off of the food for at least six hours beforehand.

Vitals Summary
I've actually been writing this post for about the last hour when I stepped out to let them do the x-ray and things have changed in a good way. TJ's heart rate is sitting around 83 bpm (it had gotten up to the upper 90's around, you guessed it, 3:30ish), his temp is 99.7' F, his sats are an amazing 100 (it literally doesn't get any better), so hopefully the O2 will be turned back down to 60 or so. His blood pressure is a little low, but in the "watch" range as opposed to the "worry" range. So compared to some of yesterday's issues, things are much better.

Meds & The Heart
TJ is on a beta blocker to keep his heart rate down, which is not entirely uncommon, I was on one at 21 for a month. He is also on another drug, amiodarone, that is meant to work with fast heart rates to help with the arrhythmia.

Perspective
An extended family member recently noted that on the blog we haven't used the term "stable" it is usually used in the media. When you read "stable" in the newspaper it means someone is doing well over a long period of time, when you read it here, we usually mean that we got the vitals back into a normal range.

Even for us -- the family -- it is easy to start losing the sense of urgency. TJ has been in the ICU for 13 days now, and seems to have fallen into a pattern: relatively good night, crisis at some point during the day, resolution of crisis, rinse, wash, repeat. So I wanted to put up some stuff to put his condition in perspective.

TJ is on 6 drips, that is, 6 different IV's, 6 different drugs. This doesn't include the "food tube" (the ng tube delivering what looks like chocolate milk). He is on a ventilator, of which there are approximately a total 3,000 1,175** in the state of Minnesota (out of 4.9 million people in the state; e.g., not many vents), and in a cooling jacket to control his temperature.

In other words, TJ is a pretty sick dude.


*This is what looks to be a white plastic bubble-wrap type thing that goes around the chest and upper abdomen. Water flows through it at set a temperature (currently 96' F) to keep the body at a desired temperature.

**Correction thanks to Dr. P from Bethel University