1/17 More Home Talk

More of the same today. Josie felt OK much of the day and pretty crummy for about a third of the time. Some vomiting, low grade fever…you know the drill by now. More walking with the physical therapy girls…slow progress.

This morning the doc’s ordered up an EKG test and some other things because Josie’s blood potassium level was sky high. This can be a very serious problem. Of course after a recheck of the level everything was normal…but that was the third check. Turns out the Tech who took the blood did a poor job and botched the draw. The bigger problem was that the second draw was no better…both the first and second had high potassium levels and then they decided to order up the tests and treatment for the elevated potassium. It’s interesting because they’ve been supplementing her with potassium because she’s been deficient for a while…but today it’s off the charts. Well…the third time’s a charm I guess. The Tech this time got it right and the levels were just where they should be. They concluded the first two draws must have had some of the IV nutrition in the line which would have caused the reading. Whatever…just a few hundred more bucks or so for unneeded tests and treatment…but who’s counting…and we can’t be too careful now can we?

There was more discussion today about leaving for home. Deb is pressing to get it done for sometime next week. There are some real concerns about heading home and lots of coordination needs to be made with the home health care folks who will be visiting us regularly. The pumps need to be programmed, drugs need to be ordered and delivered, we need the training, we need to figure out our schedules and her environment. The docs are worried about all the bugs coming home from all the sickies at the kids’ school. So there are about a hundred legit reasons not to go home, and probably just as many to go home. She wants to, and we want her to. We’ll see how the coordination effort is going and over the weekend we’ll make the final decision. We may also decide to wait a little longer too if that makes sense. If we decide to pull the trigger on it they’ll need a couple days to finalize everything and then we can leave.

Josie’s big Whipple surgery is now on the schedule for Monday, February 19th. This can change as it has a couple times already but for now it’s scheduled so we’ve marked our calendars.