Evening Update

The comments on the previous post have been just awesome! We appreciate them all, and pray them over our friend, father, husband, and brother.

TJ's vitals are still good, his fever has been coming down (I decline to give an exact number because I haven't heard a fresh one for an hour or so.) An additional 550 cc's of the plural effusion have been drained (leaving up to 1.2 liters left in there). His fever has come down to 100 on the spot (probably due to tylenol).

The generic MRSA antibiotic they put TJ on -- vancomycin -- which proved to be a good antibiotic to put him on, as the cultures started responding on it. (For those of you who don't like Wikipedia's phrase, "drug of last resort," don't worry, this is the right drug for this situation.) He has also been taken off of the all other antibiotics that they put him on immediately, as he wasn't responding to them.

It will take 24-48 hours for the new antibiotic to really kick in, starting from earlier this morning.

Thank you for your continued prayers and encouragements. We pray that the next update won't come until tomorrow, so if they are slow to come, it means that things are going well. Anytime we have a chance to sleep well we are doing so.

P.S. Visitor Policy
Now that the doctors have come up with a specific diagnosis, and that diagnosis is MSRA, no new visitors are allowed into his room. The infection is too serious, the medical staff is appropriately worried about its spread. By law, they already have to notify the Minnesota Department of Health.

P.P.S. Mike, you're awesome! Thanks for checking in!

A More Specific Prayer Request

A consensus has been reached among the family and our most trusted friends and prayer partners. We are *not* praying for doctoral wisdom regarding the heart, we are praying for a miraculous healing. Plain and simple.

If anyone cares to, feel free to put in the comments all the NT passages that support (and some demand) such prayers. I don't think we have the energy to find them all ourselves.

Heart Issues

They just finished a second echo of TJ's heart. The results are not optimistic. He has a torn mitral valve that is "dramatically" leaking blood (doctor's words). As of right now, the doctors are consulting the heart surgeon. So far TJ's vitals have been good, blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen saturation, so TJ has managed to compensate for this some how. But if things start to go south he'll be in open heart surgery within the hour.

The valve has probably been torn for awhile, but we don't know for sure. TJ isn't a good candidate for surgery as long as he is infected with MRSA, which by definition means his heart is infected as well.

So, basically, as of right now (the doctors are still round-tabling) they are preparing for an emergency surgery if it is needed, but want to treat the MSRA first, the heart second.

Edit: TJ is on a general antibiotic for MSRA that is usually effective already, they may change that as the sensitivities (the culture with the other antibiotics around it) comes through.

Specific Requests

We are praying and declaring these Psalms over TJ and invite you to join with us.

Psalm 16, Psalm 40, Psalm 61:1-8

Finally, A Cause!

TJ's upper endoscopy went well, everything looked good that they were looking at, mainly his esophagus.

His vitals are still good except for a fever that has risen to 102.8.

But, a HUGE PRAISE! We know now that TJ has a specific type of staph infection, Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MSRA). There are two types, hospital acquired (HA) and community acquired (CA). He has CA-MSRA, probably related to an infected tooth that was pulled last Thursday.

Hopefully by this afternoon we will know what antibiotic to use against it (see this post for how they figure that out).

[Edit: Approximately 30% of people carry MSRA, but it rarely develops into anything serious. See this post for the correction.]

Here are two places of information on MRSA, from the American Academy of Pediatrics, and, of course, Wikipedia.

This is a direct answer to prayer, we finally know what we are fighting, and soon how to fight it. Fighting symptoms alone doesn't really stop the pneumonia, fighting the CA-MSRA ought to.

So THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR PRAYERS. Obviously this isn't over, a high fever is still bad, but this is possibly the turning point.

Specific prayer requests will be following in just a few moments...

Upper Endoscopy Starting Around Noon

More specifics on the procedure and staph theory in an hour or so.