Tuesday evening/Wednesday afternoon

Tuesday Dorothea began to have a rough night. The nurse flushed her stomach feeding tube with 200 ml of water - which they do every 2 hours I believe. Then she started coughing really hard, and then she threw up. Harold was in the room so he was able to call for help and to catch most of it in a pan. This was surely a very traumatic episode. After she was cleaned up and calmed down, Harold turned the reigns over to John. Shortly after that Dorothea began to complain that she couldn't breathe. John called for help, however the nurses could find no problem. The ventilator does the breathing for her - they checked all of the calibration and the machine was working fine. This morning they found that she has fluid around her lungs, so perhaps the pressure from the fluid was making her feel like she couldn't breathe. Her anxiety level was high yesterday.

Today they did a sonogram on her back to determine where the pockets of fluid are located. They marked her back with x's and the lung doctor was planning to come in after his office hours to remove the fluid. They will use a procedure with vacuum bottles to drain the fluid. They are only doing her right side today. She did have dialysis today, removing 1.9 L of fluid, but they cannot control where the fluid comes off of.

Mid morning the nurse realized that there was an issue with the stomach feeding. I am not clear on how they discovered this, but the nurse removed approximatley 500 cc of the liquid food - it was sitting in her stomach and not moving on into her digestive system. At that point they turned off her feeding for a few hours. Harold told me they started it back up this afternoon but there is no explanation for what happened earlier, so hopefully they will be keeping a close eye on it.

The dietician came in and talked with Harold. She was proposing giving her dried banana chips in her stomach feeding - to help bulk her up. She definitely needs something to help her bulk up, but they decided banana chips was not the way to go. She already has high potassium, so Harold and the dialysis tech agreed that they did not want her potassium to be even higher. The dialysis machine removes the high potassium anyway - so if had the banana chips, the dialysis would remove it. Hopefully they will come up with another suggestion. She has lost much muscle mass and could really use something to help build her muscle and bulk up.

She was very quiet today, sleeping a lot of the time which is good. She has definitely had a stressful couple of days and that is weighing on both Dorothea and Harold.