Out of ICU (again)

It looks like we’re back on the road to recovery, although in some ways it feels like we’re a little behind where we started. Becky was only in ICU for a day, but she pretty much slept and stayed in bed for three days. It sapped some of the limited strength she had. In any case, we’re back on the seventh floor in the transplant wing after navigating this latest bump in the road.

Unfortunately there was no clear or definitive diagnosis of why she felt so bad last weekend. Theories ranged from a possible blood clot in a lung to an infection to a possible interaction between some of the medications she’s on. From what I can gather in this stage of my transplant residency, I would guess some combination of infection and drug interactions. The white blood cell count seems to point to some kind of infection. A couple of her antibiotic/anti-fungal medications were modified, but nothing else was really treated directly or changed. This would make a blood clot pretty unlikely since her heart rate and respiratory rate returned to normal ranges and white blood cell count has come down.

Becky felt somewhat better today. She’s certainly not 100% or even quite as good as she was a week ago, but much better than she was over the weekend. She did participate in some limited physical therapy today. She’s very weak and has a lot of work to do - which goes against her nature. It’s not that she shies away from work. She packed up most of our house in Illinois before we moved back to Georgetown the last time. That was enough to fill most of semi. No small task. She’s resistant to people telling her what she “has” to do. We’re working on getting her to accept that it’s necessary in this case.

The good news is that all indications are that the new liver and kidney are doing well. The main focus now is getting her strong enough to get to rehab and getting her lung capacity back to where it should be.