A PAINFUL NIGHT

It was a challenging night for Ron...the pain kept him up all night. Even with the morphine drip ....the pain was more than he could sleep through. They have added percocet along with the morphine early this morning. However, the doctors were in cleaning and checking the kidney transplant wound....which was also very uncomfortable for him. The wound looked a little bit better ....the fluid that was draining from it is clear...which is a good sign there is no further infection further down. We are hopeful it will heal well. He is still extremely tender along the sternum area. We hope in a few days this will start to subside. He ate his breakfast well this morning ... a nice omelet with lots of protein. He also drank an ensure with his protein supplement...he seemed to tolerate it well. The renal doctor mentioned we really need to get him to take in as much nourishment as possible to help with the healing process. He is doing his very best to do this. He is finally sleeping ....I think the additional pain medicine is giving him a little bit of comfort. They are setting up his dialysis machine to get him started on another treatment. He seems to sleep fine through this. Hopefully, later today we can get him up in the chair again. The night nurses did a good job cleaning and treating the wound he has on his tailbone. This developed early on from his bedpan. When he coded initially, he was on the bedpan and when they did compressions on him for 1/2 an hour...the bedpan was still underneath....causing alot of bruising. Since he has been in bed so long ...it has caused the area to break down....in order to avoid any infection ...they have to keep the area clean and patched up....but it also helps to keep him off of it as much as possible...so the more frequent we can get him in and out of bed into a chair ...the quicker it will heal. He is getting a short run of dialysis today...only 2 hours...so hopefully, we can get him cleaned up and in a chair shortly thereafter. He is still being paced....the doctors want the heart medication he had been on to slow his heart rate to be completely out of his system before removing the pacer all together. Without the pacer his heart rate goes down to about 56 on his own. I think they would like to see him stay in the 80-90 range without the pacer. All in good time......