Wednesday, January 18, 2012

You ve Got A Friend

You know how they say you can judge a man by the friends he keeps? Well that, in a nutshell, is one of the many reasons why my dad is such an amazing guy.

I've been here with dad in the ICU most of the day today and have seen several of his good friends come by to visit him. One of his closest friends from high school, Jim Carlson, stopped by with rootbeer floats from Hires, their favorite burger joint. And earlier in the day his friends Mike Petersen and Bart Hopkins stopped by to check on him and brought him a Cottonwood Heights 5k shirt (which made me cry, so sweet!) There are so many others who come by all the time that I know I'm forgetting, but I hope you know how much we appreciate it and how much your friendship continues to mean to my dad.

Good news??

Dr. Cahill and the surgeon Dr. Abraham did another broncoscopy a few minutes ago to see if they could find where the air leak was coming from and they said everything looks good - the soochers are healing nicely and they didn't see any leakage. I could even see that things were looking better than the last time- less gunk down there than before. There's a small chance there could still be some rejection, but they don't want to biopsy the lung yet or start him on steroids until he gets some more meat on his bones and this air stops showing up in his chest and around the heart.

I guess he'll be here in ICU for another couple of days, but what do I know?

ICU ..... Again :(

Came by to see Dad this morning on my way to work and as I started walking down the hall to his room I noticed the door was open but the bed was gone and the room had been cleaned. I panicked and asked the closest nurse where my dad was, and they said he'd been moved down to the 4th floor ICU around 4am because he was just struggling too much with his breathing. He's on an oxygen mask with full oxygen but I was able to talk to him - I'm still waiting to talk to the nurse and see what's going on. Hopefully they'll get this figured out soon. I think this is the 9th room he's been in over the past 3 1/2 weeks. I'll post an update as soon as I can.