Dec 29

Today was a mixed bag. Around 4 am my dad pulled out his feeding tube - some more of that uninhibited misbehaving I mentioned yesterday. He did go back to the OR for a quick procedure around 4 pm this afternoon to have it reinserted and that seemed to go well.

The good news is the Respiratory Therapist was able to turn off his ventilator for about 8 hours today! He needs to be off the ventilator for 3 full days before they will release him to the rehab facility - so today felt very promising in that regard!

His hands are not restrained, but they did put on some 'mittens' to try and keep him from pulling at his tubes (did I mention he pulled out the catheter before leaving ICU and also has been pulling at the trach). The 'mittens' are almost like boxing gloves on on his fingers and palms with netting on the back of his hands. They are held on with velcro around the wrist and he's been using his teeth to try and pry the 'mittens' off. My mother-in-law mentioned a service whereby a doctor can order a 'sitter' someone to sit with him and try and prevent him from causing himself more surgeries to replace the things he's taken out - perhaps that is in our future. I think it would give my mom some peace of mind as she's been a soldier for 3 weeks now and this phase of recovery comes with exhausting new challenges.

Around 7 pm this evening his heartbeat shot up to about 140 bpm, his respiration doubled (about 50 breathes per minute) and he was running a temperature of 101.9. The nurses were able to give him some medication and bring his vitals down to more comfortable levels, but they didn't have an explanation as to why the incident happened in the first place. They did take a culture of the 'phlem' in his trach - there is a medical term for that - but don't have the results yet. He is on antibotics, so it seems unlikely he would have an infection, but with open wounds it's also not completely unreasonable. I haven't been able to find anything on the web linking this reaction to traumatic brain injury, but I'm not (yet) a neurologist. Hopefully tomorrow the doctors will be able to shed some light on the incident, or better yet, it was a fluke thing and doesn't happen again.