Quiet night

This is a good thing in the ICU. They made a change in Adrienne's sedation yesterday and she definitely seems to be more comfortable. The sedation has been tough because she's so small but has had so many drugs over the years. She needs as much sedation as a 250 lb. man. I definitely need to give her a bad time about that when she's awake. The sedation difficulty makes the nursing situation more difficult too, because each nurse needs to learn what works best for her. I spoke with the ICU director this morning and they're going to work on more consistency. Of course, we have our favorite nurses but they aren't always working.

Adrienne's chest xray looks a bit better today while her breathing is a bit worse. They're going to change her steroid today to see if that helps. I understood that she would need a trach by tomorrow but they replaced the tube a couple of days ago and she can keep it for another week. Hopefully, things will turn around by then and they can extubate rather than do the trach. She still has no white count and is needing platelets every other day so they really don't want to do any surgery.

The tube feedings are going fairly well. She's getting it at a low rate but at least her gut is responding and it isn't coming back up. Her billirubin finally went down a little today so we hope this will turn into a trend.

The mochi/matzo thing made Curt and I laugh, because Kent thought they were the same thing. Obviously, they sound a lot alike but aren't anything alike. Like many of you, we get our mochi balls at Trader Joes. Any good (Jewish) deli, especially on the east coast, will have matzo ball soup. I make really light, fluffy matzo balls with homemade chicken soup but they're definitely "cannonballish" if you aren't careful, sitting like a rock in your stomach.