Klebsiella

Well, it seems as if Noah thinks that the August long weekend must be spent in hospital as we are here once again. He is growing a gut bug this time called Klebsiella (a gram negative bug that was not being covered by the Cloxacillin he was on). The gram negative bugs always hit Noah fast and furious, so he had a rough few days and got pretty sick. We hit him with lots of fluids, and after puffing him up like a marshmallow, we finally seem to have his fluid balance under control. His platelets dropped to almost nothing, and he was transfused twice. We also had issues with his potassium again and he needed a couple of potassium infusions. His hemoglobin is still quite low, but his platelets are slowly starting to come back up. And of course, with all these antibiotics, he's got yeast growing again around his stoma. He is back on full TPN, but we have slowly started reintroducing his tube feeds and they are going well.

Today Noah is looking much, much better, is off the oxygen (other than a crappy cold he caught here in hospital) and he's ready to bum scoot the hallways. Too bad he's under isolation again! We are still waiting for a plan to be formulated to spring him out of here. A team meeting is being planned to discuss where we go from here to stop this constant "same old" every few weeks. Thankfully, everyone is in agreement that something new needs to be tried, but no one is quite in agreement as to what that should be. I have been pushing to try ethanol line locks (that we learned about at the Oley conference), but we need to figure out the technicalities of actually doing this, when right now we have so many other things that need to run through his line. Praying that an answer can be found to reduce the amount of infections.

It is so much more difficult being here when the sun is shining and we are aching to just be outdoors. The hospital is such a very lonely place. Yes, we are thankful for the summer we have been able to have, and this makes me even more thankful for our trip, but 6 weeks out of hospital is just not enough time!