Sunday, April 20, 2008

SUNDAY, APRIL 20, 2008 08:52 PM, CDT

Sam had an uneventful night last as we had hoped. Unfortunately we were not as lucky today.

I knew we were headed for bad news when I saw him this morning. His color was terrible, he was very pale, and I could just see that he was not feeling well. His blood gases this morning came back good though and we were hoping that his color just had something to do with the fever he ran yesterday. They also began to have problems maintaining his body temperature today and his temperature kept dropping below normal. Then they did his afternoon blood work.

It turns out that Sam is once again very ill. There was only 12 hours between these two sets of blood work and his blood PH had dropped to 7.20. To give an idea of how drastic this is, a normal blood PH would be 7.41. The last time that they made Sam sick for testing we waited days for his blood PH to drop to 7.28 so they could draw blood while he was in this acidotic state. For him to drop this quickly was devastating for us. To top all of this off his urine output has dropped to almost nothing.

This evening Sam looked possibly the worst we have seen him since the first day that he was admitted to the hospital 40 days ago. Because of the low urine output, they have had to stop administering the antibiotic he was on. Due to his blood PH they have stopped providing the intravenous lipid he was getting as well as removing the simple fat that he was receiving in his diet. Hopefully with these steps Sam will begin to return to normal again on his own. If he doesn't they will help him along so that he can be "healthy" again and they can determine what our next steps will be.

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