What a day we have had!
Isy had a significant amount of bleeding (coughing up blood) at 2am today. The doc was ready to put the breathing tube back in but he gave her a few more seconds and she was finally able to cough the blood out and get her breath back. As the doctor said, "this is scary for her, and it's scary for us too." A surgeon was up to see her first thing this morning. They are not ready to jump into surgery because her chest wall, lung, bronchial area is all different from the average person's due to the radiation therapy she had 33 years ago. Her anatomy is very different, with vessels that have formed that are not even in the textbook (they do expect the body to do that, it just doesn't help them right now). This altered anatomy will make healing very difficult. At least one or more of the vessels have broken and thus has created the bleeding. They decided to try embolization of the vessels one more time today. She was gone to Interventional Radiology for 4 very long hours while they searched for the leaking vessel. The doctor (who looked 15 yrs old) blocked one more vessel today and feels confident that this is the correct vessel because it looked like the dye leaked out of it when it was injected. Unfortunately the only way to tell if this is the correct one and that there are no more, is to wait and see if she will bleed again (the scary part mentioned above). She came back to ICU on the vent again (sigh). This will be easier on her body, both mentally and physically. If she bleeds, they can suction her easier and she already has a patent airway doing all of the work. It means she is sedated again and no more conversations with her, even if they were a little difficult and involved some lip reading last night. She seems to bleed during the night. (The poor night shift nurses!)
Shortly after she returned to ICU they did a chest x-ray and the doc didn't like what he saw. It appeared that her right lung had completely collapsed. It was a rush-rush-rush bronchoscopy procedure at the bedside. He found some very large blood clots in her bronchial area which he removed. Most likely these clots formed from blood that sat there and clotted. The clots acted as corks in a bottle, oxygen not getting around it very well at all. Within 1-2 hours the lung had fully re-inflated and he encouraged us by saying, "It looks much better now than it did 2 days ago."
Don and I left about 6pm. She's had a very long, difficult day. We are just a bit tired out too. I told Tony that the waiting around today was absolutely excruciating. I could think of 10 other NON-desirable places that I would rather be, than in this situation. I have had to question how much more emotional pain this family can take. She looked comfortable when we left, the machine rhythmically breathing for her. We made sure her feet were warm (something she regularly tells us to make sure we do for her some day in the nursing home...).
The doctors and nurses at EGH have done a wonderful job caring for her. There is no doubt that her life has been saved several times this week.
Thank you for your love and support. It has been a very long and painful 6 days so far, but made easier by your kind emails, texts, visits, phone calls and prayers.
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