Waiting on God

I have started this email a hundred times...being clever or funny is completely out of grasp right now.

Since we have moved from ICU, Gary actually seems to be more sick. On Sat. morning, the nurse got him up to walk to the bathroom and he passed out. Luckily, she had a belt around his waist and was able to slide him to the floor carefully. Later in the morning, he was able to wash up at the sink and go for a short walk with his walker. The "merry men" came and he sat in a chair for a while talking to them while I went to lunch. When I got back, he was back in bed and he stayed there the rest of the day and night. He never really woke up except just to say hello or goodbye. He did have a short visit with my dad in the evening and then fell asleep for the rest of the night.

Sunday morning I woke up at 6:40 and could not go back to sleep. After about 20 minutes of trying, I knew that I needed to get up and go to the hospital. I arrived just in time to see him being helped to sit up in a chair and then he passed out. It took 4 nurses to get him back into the bed and in the meantime, somehow his feeding tube got yanked out. He went immediately back to sleep.

I am so thankful for the nurse that he had today. She was much more outgoing and outspoken than any of the other nurses he's had upstairs so far. She listened to me when I said that he was sleeping too much and that I thought his blood pressure meds (4) were the wrong ones or too much or something. She called the Internal Med doctor and between the two of us, we convinced him to remove two of the blood pressure medicines. By this time, the whole family was here taking turns keeping an eye on Gary, talking to each other and trying to "bother" him enough to waken him. After another try at sitting up and another episode of passing out, I literally went into commando mode (with tears), demanding to know why he was better downstairs in ICU and now couldn't even stay awake. The nurse put in calls to the Internal Med doc and the neurosurgeon.

Dr. K showed up within a very short period of time. After reading through the notes and talking to the nurse and me, he decided to keep Gary off blood pressure medicine and give him a higher rate of IV fluid, rather than put him through the reinsertion of the feeding tube. His feeling is that the combination of blood pressure medicine, slight dehydration and maybe some exhaustion from actually doing too much, too soon, too well in ICU may be causing him to need this sleep that is now going on 45 hours with only a few coherent minutes. He promised me (and I'm holding him to it) that if anything bad was going to happen as a result of the surgery, it would have already happened.

He is still sleeping as I write this, but we did wake him up enough to feed him some ice chips and do a few speech therapy exercises. Alyssa laughed at me while I cheered him on in his "La-la's" and we saw his tongue touch the roof of his mouth several times. If he can swallow just a little tomorrow, they might be able to thicken liquids enough to feed him and not have to reinsert the feeding tube.

Please God, help him to sleep off the blood pressure medicine and still have a blood pressure number that isn't scary. Give him the strength to wake up and not be dizzy, so he can begin his pt exercises again. Help every little part of his mouth to being working correctly so he can swallow. And if there is some unknown factor that is causing this complete exhaustion, guide someone to figure it out very quickly. In the meantime, thank-you so much for mom and dad, who have basically stopped everything to be here just in case I need help. Bless Alyssa, who has sat with me many hours today, encouraging me to stay positive (my sunny-side up kid). Thanks for times of laughter with Amy, Alyssa and Sandy, who have a gift of helping me find the "funny" in everything.