Harvesting Joy

Jameson is still sleeping all of the time. The intensivist is a little nervous about it as he is so sick and has that infection. The nurses are taking cultures from both central lines daily to check on the staph. (He has a triple lumen in his left femoral and a double lumen in the right subclavian.) If this infection doesn't clear up soon, they may have to give him all new central lines. He's had a few since we've been here so it won't be an easy task; his edema makes it even more difficult and riskier. Hopefully we won't have to cross that bridge.
Jameson is still way up on fluid, but thanks to stooling over 500ml today he is negative on the day. He passed a good amount of tissue in his stool. Everyone is always so disappointed whenever there is tissue as we all keeping hoping the worst is behind us. The only good thing I can report is that there was not noticable pain this time. No rise in heart rate, writhing, cramping, rumbling, nothing. In fact, he just slept through it. Because he sleeps all of the time. We have gone down on all of his pain and sedation drugs and it doesn't seem to have made much of a difference. The fentanyl will be gone tomorrow, the pentobarb will be done on the 28th. The precedex is getting weaned and is scheduled to be off on Christmas day. I don't think we will be off the ketamine(which will be weaned the slowest of all) for a long time. But at least we are able to start the weaning process. I just wish is meant he would be more wakeful, not more sedate. Wish we knew why.
We have maxed out the bumex to get him peeing and it wasn't enough so dopamine was added to raise his pressures up enough to make him pee. But it wasn't enough so a second iv diuretic was added. And now he is peeing. Fluid is much harder to take off than put on...just like those christmas cookies are for me. :) I digress, but I think the Ronald McDonald House's goal is to make all of us moms fat and happy. We've had 2 fluid negative days in a row and his weight was down to 17.9 kg this morning from 18.5 yesterday. Now to get back to that 15kg weight... He still is super puffy and his lungs are still having a hard time working as well as they were before; he really needs to dry out!
In liver news, his ferritin level just came back today at 9899. If you remember last Thursday it was 2850. Hmmmm. No idea. Haven't had a chance to talk with the docs about it yet.