morrowlife

Here’s my lunch from yesterday – sushi and a smoothie. Now what could be better than that? The nurse commended me for my bravery, but I ain’t scared. It was avocado and fake crab. Nothing raw in there at all. I may be brave enough to eat hospital sushi, but I’m not stupid. Great Art courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam, taken in Shannon’s hospital room yesterday at lunchtime, and part of my famous Food and Medical series.

I think it’s time to take a few new pictures, don’t you, Loyal Readers? Let’s not all speak up at once, now.

Okay, now for the reason my Loyal Readers are all here. Shannon had a pretty good day today. I believe the electrolyte replenishment project is going well, although slowly. Her arms aren’t shaking anymore, so she can hold her own drinks. She’s able to speak a bit more clearly. She stood up on her own this evening. So those are some good signs. Her electrolyte numbers were looking better as well. I’m assuming her recovery from that little episode has been slower than we expected due to her generally sick condition at the moment.

In other good news, her white cell count was down to about 10 today. That’s down from 13 yesterday and 15 the day before. That’s the direction we want it to go for now. She’s been getting a lot of platelets this week, which is also typical and expected. So we’re doing well on the leukemia front.

On the pneumonia/pleurisy front, there’s also some progress. The results of a nasal swab they did the other day are back and she definitely still has H1N1 influenza running around inside her. They treated her for that the first week or so in the hospital in Nevada, but then they shifted entirely to giving her antibiotics. So I think I understand why she wasn’t getting better after the first week.

They didn’t do the bronchoscopy today. Instead, they did an ultrasound of her guts to try to figure out if her intestines were causing problems. We haven’t heard the results, but she’s probably okay gut-wise, which is good. The bronchoscopy is now scheduled for Wednesday. They’ve scheduled and canceled it five times now between the two hospitals, so it will be quite a thing if it actually happens tomorrow.

Her infectious disease guy says that even though we know she still has the flu, he wants to do the bronchoscopy anyway, just in case there’s something else in there too. They really need to identify it so they can figure out how to treat it. They’re also working on whether it makes sense to stick a needle through her back to get some of the fluid from the outside of her lungs too. We’ll know soon whether they’re doing that one.

While we’re waiting for the bronchoscopy, they’re not letting the grass grow beneath their feet. They’ve started Tamiflu at a dosage twice what she got before, and they plan to continue it for quite some time – weeks or months – until the virus is well and truly dead. They’ve also kicked up the antifungals. In addition, they’ve given her something I didn’t know existed: intravenous immunoglobulin, or IVIG. It’s a blood product that contains antibodies from donor blood. It has several uses, but the apparent use here is to give Shannon yet another tool to fight off the bacteria/virus/fungus that’s ailing her. Check out the Wikipedia article – it’s pretty interesting.

I asked the infectious disease guy how long he expects Shannon will need to stay in the hospital. He said he never predicts. I said I respect that, but we would certainly appreciate some kind of guideline we could use to plan. He said to expect to be in the hospital longer than days but shorter than months. So weeks, I guess. Not fun, but doable.

Had a phone call with John this afternoon. We continue to get closer to having a releasable product and all the materials we need for the show next month. But there’s still so much to do! I think we’ll get there, but we’re starting to scramble.

Man, do I hope we sell a few copies of this thing. Please, forensic doctors and dentists, buy, buy, buy!

And I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this rare combination food violence and Morrowlife Employment Agency job opportunity: kidnapped pig!

See you tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 21st, 2014 at 11:45 pm and is filed under food, medical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.