Another 48 Hours

No, not the sequel to the movie starring Eddie Murphy & Nick Nolte, which by the way was not near as good as the original 48 Hours; not that I would watch a rated-R movie like that and enjoy it.

No, this "another 48 hours", refers to the news we heard this morning. Audrey was set to go home this morning, and from everything we can tell and everything the docs tell us, she doing great. But, at 4 am the nurses came in to get Audrey's temperature and blood pressure. Blood pressure was good. The temperature was low, and the doctor who came in soon after explained to me that a temperature that low can be as much of an indicator of an infection as a fever. So they ordered up labs on blood, and cultures on her urine and fluids from her IV.

The results from the blood came back negative (which is good unless you're Michael Scott or George Costanza), but the cultures take 48 hours, so that's how long they want us to stay now. 48 hours ends around 6:00am Friday morning.

I joined in on "rounds" this morning when the doctors discussed Audrey to see if I could convince them to let us go on home, and take her to her doctor if they called and said the cultures showed something. They said that heart surgery patients are at a higher risk of infection and that they couldn't let us go with a potential indicator of infection still there, but if things were still OK tomorrow morning they would consider letting us go after 36 hours.

This is not what we wanted, but would still be helpful. She would get to go home and sleep in her bed and we've promised her we won't come in every two hours to check her vitals, wake her up at 5am for a chest x-ray, or any other check unless she cries for us. Audrey is pretty sleep deprived at this point. She's shown very little interest in napping during the daytime hours, and between midnight and 7am seems to be the time to play "I'm just gonna have a quick listen" for everyone wearing scrubs within a one-mile radius.

It was so bad yesterday morning (5 doctors in a row, about 20 minutes apart each coming to take a "quick listen"), that in the wee hours this morning I went to the overnight resident doctor and asked that they all come at the same time or only one do the listening and tell the others what they heard. This doctors was so great about it, she took a listen then and we didn't see any other doctors for 4 hours letting Audrey get back to sleep.

Audrey's appetite has also not picked up to where it was and we all agree, doctors included, that getting out of the hospital and getting back into a normal routine will help this greatly.

The really good news is that Audrey is fine, the doctors don't think there's much to worry about. They are just being cautious, which we appreciate, regardless of how frustrating or depressing it may be.

Please pray Audrey to get more sleep and to eat more. Please also pray for our tolerance, which is being stretched. I'll also ask you to pray for the many people we've met whose children have just as serious conditions as Audrey, but with less favorable outcomes. There are many here who are hurting greatly - too many to mention specifics. It really opens your eyes to how this is ongoing, not just when we are in the hospital with them.

Unless something new happens, hopefully our next post will be to say we're headed home. For now we're gonna hang out. Maybe I'll go rent 48 hours.