The Plan

Ashley Kate and I moved over to the cooperative care program last night. Basically we are in the Leid(which is the hotel portion of the hospital) except she is still considered a patient as opposed to being discharged. There are several reasons for this the main one being we want to watch her lungs carefully this week now that her chest tubes have been removed. The second one was pulled late yesterday afternoon.

What needs to happen in order for us to go home this weekend? A lot! She must come off of oxygen. To this point it has not happened. She is hanging on to that quarter of a liter to maintain a comfortable oxygen level. Her lungs must also stay clear of fluid now that the tubes are gone. We will be doing x-rays throughout the week to keep an eye on the effusions. She must come off of her lasix. This is a drug used to pull fluid off of the body. Ash has been discharged on this medication many times before and I'm not sure why it is different this time except there is a different doctor on this week. She is also going through withdrawals. Again we have been discharged on ativan and methadone before so I'm not sure this will actually keep us here. The last thing is her FK levels. They need to figure out what dose will give them the level they are wanting. I am drawing daily labs to collect that level. In my opinion she doesnt' look as comfortable today as she did yesterday. Her hair actually started falling out in huge clumps through the night which tells me her FK levels are too high. This may explain why she doesn't feel well this morning. So we have lots of things to pray about. As the week starts to wind down Dave and I will begin making travel arrangements if it looks like we will be leaving. Allie has soccer this weekend in Longview and Blake has baseball in Dallas on Saturday and Sunday. Ash and I would be allowed to leave on Sunday and this would keep Dave in the office for his patients on Monday. So there are lots and lots of details to line up to pull this off, but not too many for God to make come together. I know that.

The whole birthday post was pulled on purpose as was a beautiful post about my weekend with my son. I would like to say this and then put it behind me. You had better have hard facts about me and my family before you start spewing lies and accusations about us. The words that were written were the ugliest I have ever read on this blog and trust me when I say there have been some UGLY opinions given. If you are going to attack our character you had better be able to back it up because I refuse to allow you to make our son or our daughters ever wonder about who they are, who their parents are, or who their friends are. You were very, very wrong!

So I have finally taken the steps to disable comments. A tough decision I never wanted to choose, but I have. You are welcome to comment and I pray that you will because your words are SO encouraging, but our eyes will be the only ones who are allowed to read them and you will be required to leave a name of some sort. Make it up if you like, but I will no longer accept anonymous comments. You also have the option of commenting on our guest book if you click on the Ashleys website link on the left.

I also wanted to let you know that our office address is listed on the left side of our blog. Anything sent to Ash will be given to her and as alway your amazing kindness and thoughtfulness touches our hearts.

Sorry for this mess. It is truly not your problem, but mine. I hope none of you are hurt by our decision. Take care today and God bless. Trish