The blood work has not come back yet, but other tests they did yesterday do show Randy has a bacteria. From my understanding, the antibiotics he is currently on, while killing off bad bacteria, can also get rid of good stuff, and in that process, allowed this new bacteria to grow. It really just means another antibiotic. Hopefully this new antibiotic will take care of it and they won't find any other bacteria within his blood when that comes back. This new bacteria, though, is very contagious. For those of us who have healthy immune systems, it isn't an issue, but because it can be easily spread, it means we wash our hands even more than we currently were to make sure we don't spread it to any other patients there.
Randy had a great afternoon. After a very restful morning, he was very talkative. His dad called and talked to him for awhile over the phone. Randy was pretty responsive for most of it. He also had a good friend come (one that has been amazing through all of this and has come at least every other day) and he also have visitors from Boeing. With those visitors, I could see a big difference in Randy. I think it really helped him. Today, he was talking a lot more and had a few more words that were clear. His answering of questions is still not consistent ~ he will say "Yeah" to most anything, but occasionally he will shake his head no, it is kind of a hit and miss. When I told him I loved him, he said very clearly "I love you too". Of course, no one else was in the room to hear, but it was very clear. When the nurse was messing with his IV (they are having a hard time finding veins since they had to pull out the pick line from the infection), he winced and she asked him if it hurt. He said "It hurts" ~ okay, that wasn't his exact words, he put a word in between that I will leave off of the blog, but it was very clear!
The social worker came to talk to me this morning again about a skilled nursing facility. He made it sound as though Randy was going to be moved in the next couple of days. I told him that the doctor had said Randy won't move until he is done with the antibiotics, but the response I got from the social worker was that the nursing facility could give him antibiotics. Then this new bacteria came up. They can't move him anywhere with this since it is contagious. I also found out from talking to other people within the hospital that no nursing facility can take Randy as long as he has to be restrained ~ it is against the law for nursing facilities to restrain any of their patients. So when the social worker came back to me this afternoon, I pointed out that Randy has restraints, but he tried to push it off that it was just part of storming episodes and that those should pass soon. Someone had told me that it is the Harborview way to try to push patients out as soon as they can and that the social workers get a lot of stress put on them for this process. But I can guarantee that Randy's restraints have nothing to do with his storming. His storming episodes have gone down quite a bit ~ a combination of his body healing and some medication they have him on. His movements now are more exploratory, trying to remove tubes that are uncomfortable, and him trying to sit up. But as long as he is on restraints, he won't have to go anywhere. So hopefully he stays on restraints until he is able to do rehab there.
That is all of the updates I can think of tonight.
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