Post Op Day 3: Two steps forward, one step backward

That's the nature of recovering from surgery, or any major illness isn't it? Today was a "different" day for Isy. They took her last chest tube out this morning. They gave her Percocet at 10:20am and when I left this evening at 7:30, she was still feeling the side effects of it. It made her quite "loopy" for lack of any better, short/concise descriptors. LOL. She did provide me with hours of entertainment, but let's just leave it as she won't be getting Percocet anymore. She also experienced some oversedation as well from it... falling asleep while you are eating lunch and still falling asleep while eating supper, isn't a good way to spend the day. What happens when you are too sleepy from pain meds? You don't breathe as deep as you should, which has resulted in LOTS of wheezing and respiratory compromise. Her lungs really are just as sick tonight or actually are probably sicker than her heart (since her heart just had an overhaul and is totally refurbished). Those poor little lungs of hers....

She is in good spirits, we laughed quite a bit today, but she probably won't remember much of our day. She would start to tell me a story and then drift off to sleep. When I nudged her to continue she would forget what the ending of her story was and say, "you can just make up your own ending to that, I don't know where I was going with it." hahaha. Her blood sugar was running on the low end this evening so that didn't make her feel good for awhile. We got that all figured out. They have done a chest x-ray and drew some blood tonight to make sure that lung is remaining inflated, without the chest tube, and the blood work which will show whether or not she is oxygenating around all of that wheezing ... whether she has enough oxygen in her blood, or if lack of oxygen is causing her to also be sleepy. Thankfully these came back fine. They are pushing some strong anti-inflammatories for her lungs (Solu-Medrol) so hopefully that will help.

That's pretty much how the whole day was today... room 6114 was a little bit _____ (fill in the blank, it was all of your ideas) today. LOL