Wow wow wow

We had a hellacious night last night. NOTHING I could ever have predicted. My sweet, easy going, mild mannered guy turned into the anxious, paranoid, agitated guy. He went to sleep and all seemed normal enough though a little weird. He seemed to be settling in. NEVER let your guard down. NEVER.

I was awakened around 1:30am to the sound of a screeching alarm - the bed. Roger was trying to get out of bed. He was hearing voices coming from the floor - he was completely out of it. The nurses came running to find me trying to encourage Roger back down into bed. This happened two more times through the wee hours of the morning. The nurses came back in the third time and rather sternly admonished him and told him to stay in bed. As they left, I quietly told him that they were probably close to restraining him if he didn't settle down. At this point, I finally moved my cot immediately next to his bed and draped my arm over the rail of his bed so that I could keep my hand on his arm. Each time he moved to get out of bed, I was able to rub his arm/shoulder and tried "cooing" (well, as best I can coo...I'm not much of a coo'er) him back down in bed. It worked each time but made for a somewhat broken evening with not a lot of sleep to be had by any one.

Morning came much to early. But with the new day came a new improved approach to Roger's pain management. The hourly feed of morphine was stopped but the "as need" button remained. The fentanyl patch was removed. The haldol was stopped. Tordol was used instead. There was a MARKED difference. Roger still had a lot of goofy moments during the day but you could see the sun start to rise in his eyes and in his disposition. His coherence slowly has increased during the day. Tordol is administered every 6 hours as needed. He had a shot at 8:30 so we have about 5 -6 hrs of peace (he's a sleep). I'll be grabbing whatever sleep I can here shortly. The issue with Tordol is that it can cause issues with your kidney so the doctors and nurses are going to carefully monitor his creatine (spelling?) level to watch the kidneys. For now, it seems to work. I'm just happy to have a little more of Roger in the room with me.

You could tell that he was more present in a couple random moments of picking on me or the nurses. At one point one of the three different rehab therapists came into the room. She worked with Roger on dexterity related movement. She also checked cognitive ability by asking simple questions like "do you know where you are"...smartass responded..."Detroit". She got this alarmed look on her face. I looked at him and asked "are you messing with her?" He shook his head yes and then said "Indianapolis". Poor gal was a little worried and a lot confused.

Roger's chest tubes are still in. The drainage has virtually stopped. I don't have any good indication as to whether or not they will take out the tubes tomorrow or not. There is a possibility. The tubes seem to be causing the greatest amount of pain and discomfort.

Life is full of stress ~ whether work, family, friends, or whatever. Its easy to drown in some or all of it. Its up to us, each of us, to keep our heads....or at least our noses above the water. Put your life preserver on and tread water like hell until the stressful times move on.

I don't know about you guys but I can't wait to kick 2009 in the butt out the door and welcome 2010 with open arms and a big hug. ~ Angie