Update

Hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas. We celebrated Drew's birthday on Sunday - she seemed to enjoy her party and put on quite a messy show while eating her birthday cupcake. I'll post pictures sometime.

Chris is continuing to improve little by little. He did briefly go into atrial fibrillation on Christmas Day and when he dropped his blood pressure they had to cardiovert him (which means shock his heart back into normal sinus rhythm). Atrial fibrillation is a very common heart arrythmia and could have been caused by electrolyte abnormalities or his pneumonia. They have him on a drug called amiodarone to control the rhythm now. He has had trouble getting his dialysis because his catheter is clotted - they had to skip it yesterday but put some meds in to bust up the clot. They got about 2 of the 3 hours of dialysis done today but had to stop because it clotted again. So, they will likely have to replace it.

That's all the news for now.

Christy

Good news - Chris was extubated last night and has been doing well all day. He underwent dialysis again today and even sat up in bed and smiled at Teri afterwards. They will be checking labs on a daily basis to see if his kidneys are working again. We will keep you posted.

Christy

Update on Chris

Teri asked me to post something to bring everyone up to speed on events in the last week. Chris had been hospitalized with pneumonia again and Tuesday night acutely deteriorated. He has gone into acute renal (kidney) failure (he probably has some component of chronic renal insufficiency because frequently when he is sick his kidney markers have jumped up) and this acute worsening is likely due to his infection (this is Christy's comment completely). This caused his organic acid levels in his bloodstream (as well as potassium and other waste products) to increase. The only other way your body has as a means to get rid of acid is to breathe it out in the form of carbon dioxide. If your lungs aren't too happy to begin with and you throw this extra work their way, you tend to tire out which is what happened in the early morning hours of Wednesday. So, he was transferred to the ICU, intubated, and sedated to help blow off the excess CO2. That worked well and they made preparations for hemodialysis (to compensate for the kidney failure). They still have no idea what is causing the pneumonia but are treating for nasty things like fungus since he is a transplant patient with a severely weakened immune system. He tolerated his first round of dialysis and has continued to improve with his breathing so today they turned off his sedation and are going to try to extubate him soon. He will require dialysis until his kidney function returns (there are no guarantees that it will but we will hope for the best) and it is usually done 3 days per week (M,W,F or T, Th, S). So, he will get his next round of dialysis on Friday. We will try to continue updates this way so Teri doesn't have to field too many calls.

Christy