Monday Evening, 1/28/08

Things are still moving forward, but as expected, there have been a couple a minor setbacks.

Last Thursday, the overnight nurse gave Nathan the wrong formula. They normally dilute the canned formula from 30 to 20 (I forget the unit details). In this case, she gave it to him straight from the can and he threw it up later. This caused them to stop his feeds for a couple days while things settled down. To be fair, the department that delivers the formula probably screwed up his order. But I still expect the nursing staff to catch something like this before it gets to him. We've had this type of problem on a few other occasions; it usually ends up with him in the ICU. Fortunately it was nothing too serious this time.

This weekend he developed a low-grade fever. They took blood tests which came back positive for an infection. They believe it it's in his central-line. They are giving him antibiotics to treat the infection, and it shouldn't cause him to miss his planned release date for this Friday.

On a more positive note, they finally stopped his Lovenox shots for the blood clots. This means he can come home without any shots (yay!). They will also begin an attempt at cycling his multivitamin drip starting tomorrow. The plan is to cut it back to 20 hours/day, then down to 16 hours/day if successful. The plan is to try and get him some time at home when he can be free of tubes. Hopefully he'll be able to absorb the multivitamin pills soon and discontinue the multivitamin IV altogether.