ChloeWatts.com

One Month Post-Surgery 1/2/10

Day two of the New Year and … funny thing… we don’t feel any different… Go figure. Dana and I both slept at about an hour at a time. That’s about what we get when doing the overnight shift. Sandy is on nights right now and I know she isn’t doing any better.

By the way… Please forgive us if we don’t answer or acknowledge your comments on the blog. With all that is going on we hope our smiles will be felt through the airwaves. To answer all of them would take a full time secretary. We do appreciate all of you though.

Still on our string of pretty good sleep nights for Chloe. It’s especially necessary when she has PT/OT lined up for the next day. Being Saturday, the activities are a bit limited but they did add the EKG today. Dana was here when PT/OT arrived and, being she didn’t recognize them, she put up her defenses and held interview court. By the end of the session Dana was impressed with them. We have had issues with weekenders in the past so she was on guard.

Kevin was able to stop by today and bring some non-hospital food that Laura prepared. It all looks great but I ate before I got here. Dana and I almost passed in the hall as she needed to get home to Colin. She took some food and we talked on the way to her car. Poor Chloe gets really sad when Mama has to go for the night. She is sitting in bed with the snow globe that has Dana’s pictures inside. It’s not Mama but it’s something.

She and I played catch for a while and each day I see improvement. She has a beach ball in the room now and we’ll try that in a little while. She is best with that while seated but we don’t have the help for that tonight.

I’ve suctioned her twice since 6 PM and it looks like her “cold” is breaking up nicely. We are adding extra water to her feeds line and it appears it is helping many things. She has looked good tonight even though we had O2 saturation number problems. Nothing radical but definitely not where we wanted them. She turned down a cough assist, maybe because her trach site is so very sore today. We had a couple people be a bit rough with her so I’ve put the word out that we need to be very gentle, especially tonight.

Again, being the weekend, I decided to have Chloe push the call button and we were silent. They have a note out front to just send the nurse in when they don’t hear anything. We also asked them to just say, “I’ll send your nurse right in”, so Chloe knows someone is on the way. We may be on a one on one shift and away from her for a few minutes when she has to call. She doesn’t need to be panicked thinking they just ignored the button because no-one answered when asked, “can we help you.” The nurse said she’d make sure everyone knew to do this.I

She is melancholy and watching TV right now. She does like getting the emails from her friends and I told her not to feel obligated to respond. Everything takes energy from her. She is so ready to leave this place, so ready to get out of bed and walk around, so ready to get rid of the trach and start talking and eating. My hope is that all this energy is going to propel her into the direction that will make it medically feasible to do what she is ready to do.

Be well,
Ron