Week Five!!! My How the Time Doesn't Fly!!!

Well, here we are at Week Five....it's been exactly five weeks since Sonja was airlifted up here to Strong Memorial from Ithaca....and it just seemed like a little celebration was in order!! So everybody now, grab a cold one!! Put a little Ensure over ice, and lets toast all the good times...oops, careful now, bring that IV pole with ya!! There you go, that's better!! Altogether now!! Hip hip, can't pay!! Hip hip, won't stay!! Hip hip, outta my way!!!!!

You'll have to excuse me if my sense of humour is a bit blacker than usual today.

I think I'm just feeling the natural letdown of coming through that period of waiting and hoping for Sonja's organs to all come back online, all I've thought about really for the past month plus, and now that they have, some non-rational part of my brain is ready to just, well, go home. I mean, she's better now right!!?? So, Ill go get the car while you collect all her stuff.......yeah, well, buckle up, buckaroo, because the rides not over yet.

And I've taken the liberty of including this little personal rant and promo for the worst tasting, fake-milk-shake-cum-protein-medicine god ever created in part, because I'm still frequently asked by friends and family and loved ones the inevitable "How are you doing?" question...which is generally just too complicated to answer in two or three quick sentences. So with your general indulgence, I will from time to time include in this space a thought or two about my general experiences here at the Medical Big House. I hope it may be of some small interest to you all, and if not, feel free to skip the part in blue ink!! And now, back to our regularly scheduled update.


So...........it's been a few days. When we last spoke, Sonja was preparing to move into the PCU for the second time, and we were celebrating the genuine good news of her kidneys starting to improve. The good, no, the great news is that that progress has continued and her kidneys are doing better every day. Their return to function has allowed the team to put her on a med called Lasik, that helps her eliminate all the excess fluid in her system through urination. So she has been urinating buckets, if that is the correct medical term, and it's had a great impact on her systems overall.

She continued to suffer from episode of "sundowning" Sunday and Monday nights; she was disoriented and confused, and would awaken in the grips of general anxiety attacks throughout the night. By Tuesday eve she turned another corner (perhaps because the antibiotics had more fully dealt with last week's infection...hard to say), and slept through the night. Same again last evening. That's been wonderful, though we are still struggling with getting her to eat anything solid, and to get strong enough to do more serious phys. therapy.....I know, all in good time.

Today's excitement came when, after being up in the Stryker Chair (this wonderful device that flattens out like a bed to allow a patient to be moved onto it, and then re-shapes itself into a chair) for about 2 hours, she started complaining of serious stomach pain....a pain that wasn't going away after some time. Now for any of you who remember Sonja's last hospital adventure 10 years ago in Montgomery, it all stemmed from a burst divurticular abscess, a perforation in her small intestine. So this morning when she started holding her stomach and crying out in pain, my already hyper-active imagination immediately ran off down that dark corridor of familiar anxieties. The happy ending to the story is that we found that the race-car-like security belt that keeps the patient in the Stryker had somehow slipped too low, and was now pressing painfully into her abdomen. Problem solved, smiles all around. What's for lunch??

So the bottom line is that she continues to do well, and the new challenges are about gauging and better understanding what this next stage of rehab is going to mean specifically for Sonja. Everyone's body reacts differently. So it's going to be an interesting couple of weeks here!!

Meantime, hope this finds one and all happy and well, and more should follow shortly. Take care, and as always. love from us both!!

-- Paul