Post Transplant Day 12

What a difference 24 hours can make! Karl is definitely well on the way to recovery now, and they are hinting that he may be released from hospital on Friday if there are no setbacks. How good is that!

I got a bit of a scare tonight though. I went home to cook some supper for us. I brought back real plates, our own cutlery, cloth napkins...the whole deal to celebrate the upswing in Karl’s health. I walked to his room, and it was empty. Not one of his belongings was there, and Karl wasn’t there. No big deal. I assumed they had moved him. There were no nurses in the hall so I went back to the nursing station to ask where he was. “He hasn’t been moved” was my response. I second guessed myself wondering if I had looked in the wrong room, so I walked down the hall again. Picture it now...I am holding a Tupperware container full of food in one arm, and in a large cloth bag I’m carrying I have the plates,  cutlery, my purse...I make sure I look at the numbers. His room is definitely empty. Back to the nursing station. Again “He hasn’t been moved”. But this time the staff member at the desk returns with me and checks his room. “Maybe he’s in the family room,” she says. “I already checked there,” I reply.

Again she repeats that he hasn’t been moved and says we will find him. “Does he have a Christmas Tree?” she asks. When I say yes she opens the staff conference room, and there he is. So we eat our supper in there under the sign that says absolutely no food or beverages in this room. In our defence, the hospital food tray was already in there. I packed that food up after to take home to Sadie. She doesn’t seem to think it is as bad as Karl says it is!

Now of course the obvious question is why was he in the conference room? He has been diarrhea free for more than 48 hours, so the no contact/isolation band has been lifted. Part of that protocol is to completely clean his room. So all of his belongings were packed by RN Tim, and Karl, his iPad and his Christmas Tree were settled in the conference room for want of somewhere else to put him. It made for a nice change and certainly improved the setting for our supper! We are back in his room now, but they haven’t rehung the curtains. When they come back to do that we will have to go back to the conference room or go for a short walk. Did you catch the significance of the no contact ban lifted? I am sitting in Karl’s hospital  room now with no gown, gloves or mask, and the room door is open. What a difference those simple changes are making to the feel of things!

Now to report the numbers. His potassium is still down, so he had some replaced via iv. Otherwise everything is up (good news) except creatinine, which is down (also good news). He is still taking Vancomycin and will continue to take it for a regular course of 7 days if there are no reactions. He is also still getting a little dexamethasone and some Gravol for nausea, but both are reduced and he will be weaned off in the next 2 days if  he can handle it. The bone pain is gone, so no more morphine. The platelets, while rising, are below the level that permits blood thinners, so Lovenox was held again today but might be back in the mix tomorrow if the platelets continue to grow. The other regulars (antiviral and anti-fungal) are still in the pill cups every day and the antiviral will continue to be until at least post transplant day 100 when the team will decide how and when he will be given the normal vaccines again. When the malphalan killed his bone marrow, it also killed all his immunity to diseases that most of us had vaccines for as children. Karl always says he is allergic to needles, which is too bad for him because there are a lot of vaccines in his future in the spring!

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