THURSDAY, MAY 21, 2009 3:22 PM, CDT

We finally got to see Olin. He’s in the CICU, and is still intubated (although as I write this, they’re decreasing the ventilator and his propofol basal rate, to see if he’s ready to be extubated). He’s wiggling a little bit, and responds to
voices and is trying to complain, at times. Silent crying is a very strange phenomenon.
His chest incision doesn’t look nearly as dramatic as I thought it would. The incisions for the chest tubes are nastier looking, actually.
So, he is intubated, as you can see from the photo. The little line snaking into his mouth is for the ET balloon – he doesn’t have an orogastric tube. He has a central line in his neck to measure atrial pressures, a femoral arterial line for draws, and another line in his ankle that most of his meds are running through.
He’s on telemetry (obviously) and an external pacer ‘just in case’. He has mediastinal and right pleural chest tubes – yes, that’s two different ones. Last but not least, the prerequisite Foley catheter.
He’s getting the aforementioned propofol, a fentanyl basal rate, Milrone, Amicar, some albumin right now, and potassium for a 3.2 K+. Oh, yeah, and his base fluid, which I can’t even get to to tell you what it is. I think they said D10. Phew. The really hard part is over. I think we’ll make it on the downhill slide. 🙂
As an aside, we switched lodgings – the hotel we were at last night had no air conditioning, and the room had no windows, and it was AWFUL. We would have switched anyway, but a completely unexpected room opened up at the Nazarene
Well House, so we reserved that and will, unless something else happens, be staying there for the remainer of our little ‘vacation’.
Another aside: Sherry asked me to post a note that the thing in the sidebar that says “Show you care…”, mentions the kid’s name, and asks for money does NOT actually go anywhere near us. It’s donating to the CaringBridge side “in honor of”
Olin. So. Now you know.