Marvelous Monday

Welp, Grandpa is back to himself. Besides the fact that he's in a hospital bed and still hooked up to a lot of tubes and other junk you wouldn't be able to tell he was ever sick. He's been joking with the nurses and chatting with family and resting every once in a while.

They got him out of bed again today and this time they put him in a chair to eat lunch, so he was upright for a good chunk of time. Bri, one of Grandpa's nurses who took care of him when he originally came in is back with him again today. She actually requested him :) The hospital staff really likes the guy; not hard to understand why. But Bri said they tend to hang on to patients they like longer, so I told Grandpa he can start being mean to them. I don't think that will happen.

He's been taken off the Levithen and Dubutomine (sorry i'm sure I'm getting the spelling horribly wrong -but whatevs), which were the two medications he was put on immediately to increase BP and help his heart pump more efficiently. It's excellent news that he no longer needs either of those two meds. His body is regulating pretty much everything on his own now. He's still on the continuous dialysis machine, but they think he'll even come off of that tonight or tomorrow at latest.

Once he's off this machine we'll get an idea on how his kidneys are functioning. He will be put on the normal dialysis, which only runs for 3-4 hours rather than continuously. There has also been a theory on the cause of all of this which was thrown out by the ICU doc but not agreed to by all of Grandpa's attending physicians.

The ICU doc thinks it may be Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy. I can't really explain this diagnosis because I wasn't in the room when the ICU doc was discussing this, but you can google it to get a better understanding. Usually it's caused by a major-stressor (which we can't really pinpoint in Gpa's case) but this causes the left ventricle of the heart to balloon, which results in several organs being impacted - in his case, most severely, the kidney. The onset of this condition is very acute and the patient also recovers pretty rapidly, with most of them having full recoveries.

However, the cardiologist who visited Grandpa this afternoon isn't as positive that Takotsubo is to blame. She doesn't really think the heart is the primary culprit because we didn't directly treat the heart and it resolved on it's own. Usually, if the heart is the reason for the underlying illness you would have to directly treat it to see a reversal and they didn't in this case. I'm not fully onboard with her logic but as long as Grandpa is getting better that is really all I care about.

I sat in his room for a while this afternoon as he slept. When he woke up he was pretty chatty and I had a fun conversation with him about pretty much everything. Later in the day as people were entering and leaving his room I overheard him explain to one of the nurses who everyone on the "wall of pictures" was. It was pretty cool to see. He's so proud of all of his peeps, just as proud as we are of him and his beautiful heart.