April 22, 2012

Tonight will be interesting. Clayton has been more awake today than any other time since surgery. Keeping in mind he is sedated fairly well since he is still intubated. Despite that, he has been itching his nose, reaching for his iPad, opening his eyes from time to time, trying to get the O2 stat reader off his toe, and showing a little of his personality through the haze.
His creatine has continued to fall, putting it closer in line with his base line levels. The last check showed it was 0.75 and his normal is 0.3 to 0.6. He is also peeing like mad getting rid of all that extra fluid on his body. All good things. For now the plan is to extubate him again tomorrow. Hopefully for good this time. Which means an early morning for me and George. I have been staying in the PICU with Clayton every night and George comes from the Ronald McDonald house every morning. Then I go to the RM house around 6ish and clean up and snag a couple hours sleep and go back to the PICU. In the morning however, we will be moving our routine up a couple of hours so that we will both be there from 5 on as they prepare him for extubation. It's a process that seems to take a few hours, so they start early.
As far as our experience here goes so far, I have to say that it has been good. I have been very impressed with both hospitals here in NYC. The set up of the facilities and the staff have both been awesome. Now when I talk about how the facility is set up, I mean the particular units we're in. The hospitals as a whole are crazy. They are great big white mazes of different elevators, wings and towers. Hopefully we'll be out of the PICU and back to Memorial Sloan soon!