After a couple of hours in the ER, they finally moved Grandpa to a room in the ICU. He had an assortment of doctors come for a visit. There was an infectious disease dude (who made the mistake of ticking Mom off), there was a cute little Indian Nephrologist (kidney doc), there was surgeon Briggs with his cute attending surgeon, Dr. Dan. Dr. Teezen was the main ICU primary care doc who had the fun job of managing this crew.
The initial conclusion by several of the doctors was ichemtic colitis. They believed that the source of the sepsis was in his "gut" - apparently that's a medical term. This would probably explain why Grandpa was so distended in his belly and was so uncomfortable. Although there was some dispute among the doctors. I guess docta dan (sorry - I can't help but say it like leutinant dan), never thought ichemic colitis was the main culprit.
So most of Wednesday has now passed and Becs and Rach make it back to Fargo around 10:30 pm. Dad picked us up and brought us home. Tucky was very happy to see his girls. And then very upset to see his girls put on jackets again so quickly. We made another trip out to the airport to collect the short medical one (Pam) at 11:30 and then went to Grandma and Grandpa's house where Vick was taking good care of Grandma.
Thursday morning we all shuffled back to the hospital to begin a day that would quickly become very draining. When Grandpa awoke from his morning nap he was pretty confused. He had no recollection of how he got to the hospital and what happened to him to make him so sick. Mom and Pam explained things to him but he was still very aggitated that he didn't quite know what happened. Becca and I peaked into the room and got a lovely smile from him.
Then we had a visit from Dr. Briggs (is that his name?? I feel like it may not be, but i'm going to keep saying it). Dr. Briggs was talking about the colitis and how going in to see what the colon looked like would be full of risk but was the only way we could determine the main cause of the sepsis and hopefully give us something to try to fix.
Briggs said the best outcome would be for him to go in and find a piece of the colon that was in bad shape and be able to remove that without further damage to the rest of the colon. But there were a couple other options where the result wouldn't be as good. He said he could go in and find that there was no way to save the entire colon. In that case he would have to forego any type of removel and just sew him back up. The other possible outcome was to find the colon in "semi-bad shape" where a lot of it looks bad, but there is no clear line between the bad and the good. In that case he would have to do the same. So basically he was saying there was a 1 in 3 chance of a good outcome. But we still felt it was necessary for us to find some answers.
So after the Briggs visit we had another visit from Teezan (the main guy). I'm sure he has a title but I can't remember it and so I'll continue to call him the main guy. That was also a bit rough. He basically said that if we didn't do anything, he'll only get worse. I think several of the doctors brought up the fact that he was 88 and blah blah blah, something about age, blah blah. I kind of wanted to yell STFU (sorry Grandma and whoever is reading this and doesn't know what that means...it's just like saying "please be quiet" but not so nicely). Anyway - I was pretty sick of hearing that from these d-wads because they have NO IDEA who Grandpa is and the fact that this guy has a good 10 years left (in my semi-medical opinion) and they shouldn't talk about age, because it's relative.
So rough day to say the least. The plan that evening was to go ahead with a scope or laproscopic procedure where Dr. Briggs goes in and makes a couple small incisions and inserts a camera so he can see the bowels to determine if there is this colitis stuff. They decided that the scope/exploratory surgery would be first in line and then they would start Grandpa on the dialysis machine right after that to help his kidney out and get his blood cleaned out because his toxicity levels were quite high.
Will go into detail abou the surgery in the next post....
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