My Spin For Kids campaign. Thank you.
Since the loyal reader might have been soooo board by this blog, we decided to spice things up a bit.
The infection in the dialysis lines is also in the TPN line. Strangely, fluids are flowing from the outside in (which is the important direction), but for some reason they can't draw blood out from this line - something they want to do to understand the infection better. Anyway, about the damn infection: To my understanding (DUH, this entire blog is "to my understanding". You're stuck with me...) the bacteria sticks to the inside of the lead lines and the blood vessels. The antibiotic-Drano should clean it out. In order for the Drano to treat the body efficiently, first the lead lines must be cleaned. Now, the dialysis Blue and Red lines can be "locked" (plugged) with the antibiotic. The antibiotic just sits there, eating the bacteria off of the plastic lines. When it's time for dialysis, they unplug, pull the antibiotic out (so she wouldn't get too much of it), and do the dialysis. When it's done, they re-plug. That's the "easy" part. The complication comes with the Purple TPN line. Since they cannot draw out of this line, they can't lock it either. If they lock it as described above, without the ability to draw some antibiotic back out, then she'll have too much in her body. So instead they just keep giving her antibiotic in a regulated rate so that her body will get some but not too much. The hope is that the bacteria will be killed that way.
This is where the efforts are focused on now. Different Drs have different theories (and thus different strategies) and they all talk to agree on a unified approach. It will take a few days, I'm told, until they will know something definitive about the infection.
Meanwhile it looks like we have some improvement - as of Saturday. Liam had a restful night (Fri-Sat) and she's having a quite day. We even see some brief smiles here and there. We went out to the garden on her wheelchair. She's sleeping a lot, which is very typical of her every time she recovers from something. She doesn't need the heavy-guns pain medication too much.
Keep your fingers crossed.
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