Sunday afternoon: pneumonia danger emerges

All day yesterday, Saturday, nothing much happened, except that he remained in ICU on TONS of morphine, and everything he said was hilarious. It turns out that if you deliver even a mildly funny line with a really long, straight face, and your eyelids half closed and your eyes rolling around, it will come across as the funniest thing anyone in the room has ever heard. Sarah and I were laughing so hard yesterday, we were having to put sweaters in front of our mouths to keep the noise down. Bill is really hilarious anyway, but put him on morphine, and he's Steve Martin or Jonathan Winters.

And he was doing funny things too. Did I tell you that he put on his precious reading glasses, even though his eyes never once went in the same direction, and then he tried to watch television through the reading glasses and said, "What is WRONG with that television? I can't read a single word on the screen!"

Then he was using his morphine button to try to turn down the volume on the basketball game and getting so much morphine that he kept falling asleep in the middle of pushing the button repeatedly.

Well, there was a lot more funny stuff he said.

But today wasn't that funny. In fact, it wasn't funny at all.

His ICU stay concluded, and they moved him to a regular room on the 6th floor, the urology floor, room 6307. (All rooms at Duke are private. That is such a bonus!)

So I thought it was a great sign that they moved him on schedule, maybe even slightly early, but it was more about room availability than the idea that he was invincible.

So I happened to walk up to his new room just as a bunch of doctors were standing outside talking, so SNOOP that I am, knowing that doctors won't tell you stuff, but if you EAVESDROP you can find out more, I pretended like I was waiting for another room door to open and stood right beside them listening.

The main doctor seemed to be saying a bunch of stuff (which I couldn't hear even with my expert eavesdropping skills) but then she picked up a phone and called Urology with some concerns. She spelled is name out, so I knew for sure she was talking about him.

They were concerned, first, about his heart. It is beating way too fast. She said she was concerned about his continuous tachycardia (fast heartbeat) and she didn't know "what that was all about." (She is saying this into the phone).

Then they were concerned because his kidney function numbers had gotten a little worse. Yesterday, his BUN (something about urea nitrogen) was 25, which is several points over the limit, but it had risen to 28 today, and his creatinine (has to do with kidney function) had gone up from 1.1 to 1.8. [I had been researching all this stuff last night in the hotel, and found a kidney function calculation page, and even at 1.1, his kidneys are in the partially malfunctioning department, so at 1.8, that isn't a good development.] But no one was educating me on this,; they were just throwing numbers at me. Which is GOOD. Because i guess if they were really freaking out, they would sit me down and enlighten me about what the number meant. So maybe I'm overly anxious, but still, I didn't like the direction of the numbers.

But as time went by, they noticed that he had fallen into the danger zone on his oxygen. He was in the alarm area--and this big alarm kept going off and scaring him. Finally, they had to return him to maximum oxygen to get him into the normal area.

Then his heartbeat was bad. It was supposed to be like maybe 70 and it was 120, sometimes higher, and wouldn't go down.

It's still not down.

Then he told me that Dr. Walther had come in and put The Everloving Fear of God into him saying that if he doesn't get up and walk around, he has a big chance of getting pneumonia or a blood clot and dying really fast. Good ol' Walther. The Walther Motivational System.

But he's right, of course. Well, yeah!

So Dr. Walther wisely sent a physical therapist in to make Bill move around. Bill wanted to move around, but was in so much pain. So he just squished the daylights out of his morphine button and tried to cooperate with the physical therapist

But when the physical therapist saw how fast Bill's heart was beating, he called Urology, and Urology said Bill wasn't allowed any exercise until they get his heartbeat under control, but Bill had to move into a chair and sit up, to fight blood clots, as Bill has a high risk--he's had them twice before (see spider bite episode if you get really bored).

Bill was completely pITIFUL moving into the chair. He looked gray, he was in so much pain, and it took everything he had just to move his foot an inch at a time, but he did it.

But suddenly a bunch of unexpected blood started dripping all over the floor and something had gone wrong with either his stomach stitches, which began to bleed kind of heavily, and also blood was coming out of his ((((((I'm not saying it on a blog))))))).

So THAT scared Bill, and the nurses started watching that to figure out what to do.

But the worst thing is that his lung capacity started going down and at the same time, his fever suddenly went up.

He felt really hot when I was helping the nurse move his legs, and then I saw him break out in a sweat, but I didn't think of a fever because he didn't have one at noon. But by 2 pm it had jumped up almost to 101. That wasn't good.

Nurses started coming in and getting him to do things to fight pneumonia.

The last nurse said to me, "I'm not diagnosing pneumonia, so I don't want you to hear me saying that. But I'm saying it looks dangerous for pneumonia, and we have to start doing things to prevent it or stop it early."

Later, they tried to cut back his oxygen, but the alarm kept going off, as his oxygen kept dropping. I guess maybe his lung capacity should have been improving, and they thought he could be off oxygen by now, but his lung capacity was not getting better and seemed to be getting worse in that his ability to move this little blue ball in a tube, using his lungs, was getting worse and worse.

Well, at that point, he was so completely exhausted, so I said I would go out for a while and let him sleep and not worry about having company. I think that even tho I repeatedly tell him not to try to entertain me, he still doesn't rest as well when I'm there because he seems to think he has to talk to me every so often.

But I'm going back in a couple of hours and see what is going on with him.

I EXPECT to write again tonight when visiting hours are over and let you know what develops.

Maybe all this is completely normal, but it just didn't seem all that normal to me. Then again, when it comes to my hurtin' cowpoke, I'm a little anxious, you might say.

Love to all of you and thank you for caring about him.

Till later tonight.