Kenny update
I've been in Colorado for about 45 hours now and this is the first chance I've really had to sit down and post.
Kenny was discharged from the hospital yesterday afternoon, nine days after he was first admitted and a full two weeks after the initial trip to the ER. At this point he is not actively dying, but whether he is actually getting better is entirely unclear. Yeah I'm home with an oxygen tank because when he breathes just room air his oxygen saturation drops alarmingly. he has to spend 14 to 16 hours a day hooked up to a kangaroo pump, which slowly drips liquid nutrition into his intestines. a catheter bag is attached to you his old G-tube, which goes into the stomach, and bile drips continuously into the bag. It turns out that a bile is bright green -- green like wheatgrass juice. When I first saw the bile bag I couldn't believe it -- it looked like alien slime, like the inside of an insect, not like something I should be dripping continuously out of my brother. Turns out the color is perfectly normal, all of us have gastric juices that color, but most of us never see them. If the bile isn't draining properly from his stomach he throws it up. It doesn't have much of an odor, but it is a slimy and you can tell that he is still often quite nauseous. He is still in pain from the pneumonia, and he has been running an intermittent fever ever since we got them back to the house. It is hard to see him hooked up to so many machines, hard to see him in pain, hard to see what a struggle it is for him to be alert.
I have a lot more to say, but dragon is being particularly buggy and I have a student calling me for a phone tutoring session any minute now. I don't have any sense yet of when I will be able to come back to Boston, whether he is going to be able to stay home, and very little sense of what more we can do to make him comfortable. I feel emotionally much much better being here, though, helping, than I did being in MA waiting. My mother is just stupidly tired, and every little thing I can do makes a difference.
Kenny was discharged from the hospital yesterday afternoon, nine days after he was first admitted and a full two weeks after the initial trip to the ER. At this point he is not actively dying, but whether he is actually getting better is entirely unclear. Yeah I'm home with an oxygen tank because when he breathes just room air his oxygen saturation drops alarmingly. he has to spend 14 to 16 hours a day hooked up to a kangaroo pump, which slowly drips liquid nutrition into his intestines. a catheter bag is attached to you his old G-tube, which goes into the stomach, and bile drips continuously into the bag. It turns out that a bile is bright green -- green like wheatgrass juice. When I first saw the bile bag I couldn't believe it -- it looked like alien slime, like the inside of an insect, not like something I should be dripping continuously out of my brother. Turns out the color is perfectly normal, all of us have gastric juices that color, but most of us never see them. If the bile isn't draining properly from his stomach he throws it up. It doesn't have much of an odor, but it is a slimy and you can tell that he is still often quite nauseous. He is still in pain from the pneumonia, and he has been running an intermittent fever ever since we got them back to the house. It is hard to see him hooked up to so many machines, hard to see him in pain, hard to see what a struggle it is for him to be alert.
I have a lot more to say, but dragon is being particularly buggy and I have a student calling me for a phone tutoring session any minute now. I don't have any sense yet of when I will be able to come back to Boston, whether he is going to be able to stay home, and very little sense of what more we can do to make him comfortable. I feel emotionally much much better being here, though, helping, than I did being in MA waiting. My mother is just stupidly tired, and every little thing I can do makes a difference.