More Details on Thursday

Posted on July 22, 2005

Tagged brad : More Details on Thursday

Yesterday, Brad was on 14cc of morphine pretty much the whole time after surgery. Today, he was on 12cc and just about to go down to 10cc when he ran into the problem with not responding to the nurse. That shot negated all the morphine in his system. I'm not sure what level he went back on, but when he got in trouble the second time, they left him off the morphine for an hour or so. He was pretty alert and not in too much pain for a while, even playing on his new PSP. Elaine had two guys come in to have Brad sit up on the edge of the bed for a while. She wanted him up about 10 or 15 minutes, so she sent the guys away for a few minutes. Brad couldn't take more than 3 or 4 minutes, so Elaine, another nurse and I got him back down again. The pain was severe, but eased up for a while. I believe at that point, he was probably on 8cc.

Julie Carter came up to visit for a while, so I ran out to eat while she visited with Brad and Rhonda. When I came back, Elaine and the night shift nurse (Denise) had sat Brad up for a few minutes to look at the dressing on his back (where the epidural is). Elaine stayed past her quitting time to help with that and to go over the day with Denise - she's a really special person. At any rate, the combination of sitting up and lowered morphine rate caused Brad to have really severe pain, almost unbearable. Every breath was awful. Denise paged the doctor, presumably Dr. McCloud (the anesthesiologist). He said to go back to 10cc. Because the epidural doesn't work that quickly, he also said to give him a shot of morphine through the IV. That has Brad resting now.

Rhonda and I are both staying up here tonight. It's hard to take seeing him in that much pain. There will be more before we can take him home. I would imagine he'll have to be able to sit up for a fairly long period of time before we can even think about going home. We're good right here in our private pediatric ICU.