At The End Of The Day

What a difficult day. We both feel like we were kicked in the ass as we exited the hospital yesterday with the whole MRSA thing. I'm trying not to get hysterical, but all day I kept having memories of Parker when he was in septic shock with the VRE. I cried a lot today. Hopefully more in private than in front of Parker.

He had quite an emotional day himself. He had his own set of memories coming to him, thoughts of waking up in the ICU, remembering the night he couldn't get to his phone to call the ambulance, looking at his swollen stomach with the retention sutures in it and wondering how he was ever going to get through the pain he was in, begging for water and only getting the green lollipop sponge things to rinse out his mouth..... All these thoughts made him very emotional.

Thank God for Dustin. I was going to go get new mattress stuff and sheets etc. for Parker because he's had so much trouble sleeping on his old mattress since he was in the hospital. He woke up this morning in a lot of pain.

I didn't know not to give him Doxycycline while he was laying down.... it made him throw up twice in a row, both times it was bile. You know how scary bile is to us now. So I didn't feel like I could leave him here alone. His leg where they harvested the skin for the graft hurts like a *%&$@#*)!@! and he can't get up and move around easily, so if he had to go to the bathroom while I was gone he would have been stuck. And he had quite the stomach issues this morning in addition to the throwing up. So I called Dustin and asked if he could run an errand for me.

Not only did he run this awful girl-errand of buying mattress pads, sheets, pillows, trash cans and tons of disinfectant at Walmart, but when he delivered the stuff to the apartment, I know he saw we were really struggling with the day. He made up some excuse of not wanting to get into the traffic to go home, and stayed with us and made us laugh a lot for several hours.

I sent Dustin and email and said that at the end of the day, if you can look in the mirror and say you made a difference to someone else, then you can say you had a good day. Dustin had a GREAT day today! So many thanks for knowing exactly what we needed today.

Thanks, also, to so many of our friends in IMC who reached out to us today through emails, Facebook and text messages to be sure we were doing okay. You, too, made a difference.

P.S. I forgot to mention that the lung doctor who was on call last evening did come and did finally take the trach out. He didn't want to because Dr. Shapiro didn't want to until after the sleep study. But Parker was determine, and MAD (oh, so mad!), so he agreed and took it out. Thank goodness for that.... :-0