The nurse tonight is horrible. The bad thing about being changed out of ICU is the nurse to patient ratio is noticeably different. She messed up the sleeping meds they are supposed to be given once at around 10 then again at around 3 am to keep him asleep all night. She gave them all at once which caused Tracy to really zonk deeply out and his blood pressure to drop 70 over something. She did the nebulizer treatment and forgot to hook the oxygen back up so his O2 sats dipped down in the 80s rather quickly. So one minute all was well the next his blood pressure and oxygen were dropping and we could not get Tracy to wake up. The nurses aide was the one who saw that the oxygen was not hooked up and checked about the meds. So I am thankful for the one with the less education. His O2 is back up and the aide is checking the pressure every 30 minutes and she thinks as the sleeping meds wears off the pressure will go up, his heart rate is fine. Then when my heart settled back down, I noticed that his tube feeding was coming back out of his nose. The rate was set way off. And backing back up.
I wish I could see the future. There is slow progress or sometimes I think I am making up the progress. It is sad that I am hoping we can get back to where we were at before this began which was really at a bad place. I do not know which doctor to believe. Certainly I like Dr. Law and I think he is smart. He has been right about Tracy pulling through, but he has no pull at Cleveland Clinic (which is where our insurance will pay 100 percent) and is having a hard time getting through to anyone. He honestly says that there is not a chance that Tracy would be put on a list now because he is too sick. Even though it could take up to a year to find a lung, he is too sick now for one. Dr. O'Mara believes that Tracy can get much better without a lung transplant with just the trach. I need to talk to him more but he is hard to catch. He does not have a practice. He is only an ICU doctor part time. But i would like to get a name from him. We do not have enough doctors :). Dr. Doom thinks Tracy should be dead.
Even if we do not need full time home health care our life will be hard when we get home. The feeding tube will need to stay in place for awhile because wasting is a disqualification for a lung. That takes maintenance and certainly Tracy can not go anywhere with it. The trach will need maintenance. Joshua will actually have to be trained also. There needs to be two people in the household if possible to learn how. I guess if the other person in the house were Nancy they would not do that. Tracy is so weak, so frail, so tired. HIs life is still very precarious and I think that if he crashes again I would let him go. The two mistakes made by the nurse tonight if not caught would have been almost enough to set him way back again to deciding between life and death. So I wish I could see the future. I hope this was all worth it to him.
Off topic...not that I really have a topic...but I get an employee discount at the coffee shop now.
