Michael is doing fine and was able to get another decent night’s sleep. His morning labs look all right; the values that have been fine are staying fine and the ones they want to see improve are still improving. He had three small meals yesterday and, though he still needs to build up his appetite, what he is able to eat has given him no issues whatsoever. With a complicated surgery like Michael’s, you never really know how the digestive system will respond when food comes back into the picture but it appears to be consistently and delightfully cooperative, which is a big relief.
Nutritionally, he’s still receiving an IV bag of calories and nutrients to supplement what he’s able to eat from his meal tray. The doctors have us tracking everything he eats so they can calculate how to best taper off the bag of calories. As his oral food intake increases over the next couple of days, they’ll back down on the bagged calories until he’s able to rely solely on solids.
Michaels main issue continues to be fluid retention. His body is definitely releasing fluids but his overall swelling isn’t really going down so something in his system just still isn’t ready to play nice. The standard medications doctors rely on to manage this sort of thing have to be used very carefully with Michael because they are tricky for someone with his newly sensitive body chemistry. The best thing Michael can do is walk but between the swelling, the general activity associated with hospital life, and the mental load of all that’s happened for him in the last three weeks, his stamina has taken an understandable hit.
Although we haven’t seen the lead surgeon today, he’s already been in touch with the team this morning and they’ve decided to do another CT to see if they can glean some more data on the fluid retention. Michael and I were talking about it and both of us think that may be a precursor to the in-room procedure they were considering last week. We both hope they decide to do it because it will take away a lot of the fluid in short order without disturbing the delicate blood chemistry they’ve worked so hard (and successfully) to stabilize. So, we’ll se how that goes for him today.
Yesterday was a rough one, mostly from the emotional blow of hearing he’d be here another week or so. There was also some cross communication happening among various teams with regard to his nutrition management so there was a lot of people in and out while everyone figured out who was going to take the lead on that aspect of his care. Most of my mental energy yesterday went to supporting Michael with all of that. What was leftover went to meeting with various people to emphatically encourage them to get themselves together and form a cohesive plan instead of continuing to issue us conflicting nutritional guidelines. I apologize for the brief updates yesterday but I was standing my ground among (at last count) 13 doctors, nurses, and dietary technicians across four different teams and didn’t have much leftover for anything else.
I believe we now have a solid nutritional plan for Michael and, after a decent nights sleep, he has regrouped and is ready to get up and moving today after the CT. In fact, he was up walking with me before sunrise.
I’ll be back this evening with an update on how the day went. ❤️