CHLA - day 5

Thing are looking better.

He's been in CTICU (cardio thoracic ICU) for 24 hours and I see a lot of improvement. He hasn't had a fever since yesterday evening, yay! And they "think" they have identified the culprit causing us all this trouble.

As it turns out, it is not a gastrointestinal infection. His blood labs grew a bacteria called "gram positive cocci." It's a type of staph infection and the doctor told me he probably contracted it here in the hospital. It could have happened during the cath or during the absurd amount of blood draws and IV attempts while he was recovering. (Seriously, his left arm looked like a pin cushion from all the failed attempts to draw blood. We finally started requesting a certain nurse that could get blood the first try, everyone else would just poke and poke to no avail. Pure torture for him and us). Anyway, we're still waiting to hear if his stool samples tested positive for anything. He is on a strong antibiotic to fight the gram positive cocci, so far, so good.

The bad news is that his sats have been all over the place 58-83 and he's on 6 (yes SIX) liters of oxygen. His normal range is 75-85 on .5 liter. He has not been allowed to eat since yesterday afternoon. He is on a fluid IV to keep him hydrated. He also has an NG tube (feeding tube from his nose to his belly) but this was not put in so he could eat, it was put in to allow air to escape from his belly because he was having severe gas pain. He won't be able to eat until his sats are stable on 4 or less liters of oxygen.

The good news is that he and I both got to sleep last night. In ICU he has one dedicated nurse and she's pretty much the only person who comes in during the night. They gave him medicine to keep him comfy and he's bothered as little as possible. I stayed here again last night but since he's not eating, I was able to sleep all night, with the exception of pumping at 4am.

I know there's a lot of info in this post. Abe did a great job of summarizing what's happening:
We are in ICU now. Santi is sedated and getting sleep, we've finally received some tests back and one has confirmed he has a bacterial infection (that they admit he probably got from the hospital) and he is now being treated for that. Once that is taken care of he should be getting/feeling better. Everything snowballs into something else- he got an infection, his body creates a fever to fight the infection, the fever takes his oxygen to heat the body, then he needs MUCH more oxygen so he's on a high flow oxygen in icu, high flow oxygen doesn't let you eat because of the amount of air that could get trapped in the stomach, he can't eat so he has a feeding tube and iv's for meds, can't sleep if hungry so he needs to be medicated. Sucks. And on top of all that, poor guy has to keep getting pricked for blood test and changing iv's from his arm to foot to arm.

We've had a wild few days. But I believe the worst is over and soon enough we'll have our sweet, smiley, Santi back in our arms.