6 days in ICU

It is Sunday night and Dave has been in ICU for 6 days now.  Much has happened in the past week and there have been ups and downs.  The hospital did cultures on his blood, sputum and urine and found he had 2 infections; a URI and pneumonia.  The good news is that they found no bacteria in his blood which would indicate sepsis.  Sepsis is an extremely serious condition and thankfully we do not need to add this to the list of things that Dave needs to fight.  By doing the cultures Dave's Drs have been able to identify exactly which bacteria are present and were subsequently able to get him on the exact type of antibiotics to fight the infections.  This has seemed to really help and the past few days he has been showing some improvement each day.

As I mentioned in my last post, Dave was put on a ventilator when he went into ICU.  This is essentially a tube, about the same diameter as a dime, that goes down his throat into his lungs.  As you all can imagine this is extremely uncomfortable for Dave and as a result they keep him heavily sedated to make him more comfortable.  Remarkably, Dave can breath on his own quite well but his lungs continue to produce secretions that Dave is unable to cough up.  They use the ventilator to go in and suction the secretions.  Each morning they back off of the sedation and see how his lungs handle it.  During this time Dave is awake and responsive and showing improvement each day.  I was lucky enough to be visiting Dave this morning during this time.  He was awake and recognized me right away.  He cannot talk because of the ventilator but he was trying his hardest to anyway.  He looked good, so much better than the last time I saw him.  When the Drs came in they said he had defintely improved since yesterday and it was decided that tomorrow Dave would be taken off of the ventilator!  This is a huge relief and will do so much towards making Dave more comfortable.  It is important to note that he is not out of the woods yet.  Once he is off the ventilator they will monitor him very closely to ensure that he is not having any respiratory difficulties and continue with the antibiotics.  At this point Dave will stay in ICU until the team of Drs, respiratory therapists and nurses there are confident that he is recovering from the pneumonia and are comfortable with him moving to a regular hosptial room.  There is more left to fight but from what I saw this morning Dave still has a lot of fight left in him.

Tomorrow is a big day.  Everyone continue to send prayers and happy thoughts to Dave and Sharon and I will let you all know as soon as I can how it goes without the ventilator.  Stay tuned...

Karen - there are actually 5 dogs!
Sharon - the pics are great but I think you need to find one with all 5 of them.
Dave - sounds like you need to get back to work...someone is a having a good time in your bar!