mike's pneumonia chronicles #18

Back to where I had left off on Nov. 9 afternoon…I went up to ICU to see Mike. The curtain was drawn in front of his bed and Barbara was at the foot of the bed wearing a mask watching the doctor putting in a new chest tube for Mike. (I had to go out to the waiting room). The CT showed that Mike’s right lung was flattened from front to back which hadn’t previously shown on the x-ray so there was a large area of air in front of his lung that had to be removed by a chest tube to reinflate the collapsed lung. When the doctor inserted a large needle into the front of Mike’s chest, instead of the empty space that the CT had shown, his lung had reinflated already and so he hit lung tissue. Mike started bleeding and coughing blood out of his trach tube. The doctor had to call for a surgeon to assist him. Barbara called me and I came back into the ICU. We stood outside the room while the doctors frantically worked on putting in a chest tube in Mike’s side and doing whatever they were doing to deal with the bleeding. When everything was stabilized we went back in the room to see Mike for a while, speak to the doctors and pulmonary therapist and then much later go back to Barbara’s home in Riverside.

Nov. 9, 10 p.m.: After getting Barbara’s call I left my home and drove back to Kaiser Riverside, talking to my friend Debby on the cell phone for support as I drove. When I got to his room it was a scene of a code blue drama with half a dozen doctors and nurses frantically working to save his life. Barbara was at the end of the bed calling out her encouragement of how much she loved him and how much her children and she needed him and not to die. When Barbara had arrived Mike’s Sats had gone down to 19 on the monitor. He looked dead. She started proclaiming her love and yelling for him not to die and the Sats started climbing and went all the way back to 100. The doctors had never seen anyone recover from Sats that low and said it was miraculous. The Sats continued going up and down but never back into the doomsday area. They continued working, putting in new chest tubes and trying to draw out air or clots or whatever. He was off the respirator and a series of respiratory therapists were trading off bagging him by hand. They each worked to the point of having blisters and very tired sore hands. Eventually he was stable enough to be reconnected to the respirator.

Dr. Bach is a brilliant, energetic, caring M.D. He said they would have to use a bronchoscope to go into the lungs to see what was going on. He ran back to his office to get a grasping tool that Kaiser Riverside had only received a week ago. The bronchoscope is a tool that has a long thin cable with a tiny light at the tip. He could feed a wire grasper down through it to grasp things in front of the tiny camera at the end. When he went down into the bronchioles he encountered slimy clot-like pieces. He would grasp them with the tool and laboriously try to withdraw them without letting them get away or break. They used 3 different types of graspers, one that was modified on the spot to fit the situation. Even standing outside the room we could see through the window on the monitor what he was grasping and doing. He’s a very outgoing, optimistic, enthusiastic doctor. He had his staff cheering when he got a hold of a big piece of the gunk and pulled it out. I asked a nurse outside the room what that stuff was and he said he had never seen any thing like it. The stuff was blocking Mike’s airways and preventing him from getting adequate oxygen. One of the first big clots was sitting in an area called the carina where the two main bronchioles branch off to the lungs, so it was blocking both lungs. As far as I understand so far the blood from the lung injury earlier in the day combined with left over dried mucous from the pneumonia and caused all this blockage. Dr. Bach worked tirelessly 5 hours pulling these tiny pieces of matter out of Mike’s lungs until after 3 a.m. He was the on-call doctor on his day off and had to come back to work the next day. His efforts were heroic.

Other family members were there also; my daughter Brenda, sister Jackie and her husband Fred, friends Jane, and Millie (a neighbor who had brought Barbara to the hospital while her husband Doug stayed with the kids.) Mike’s parents, their friends Marc and Roslyn Jones, and their other son Aaron were there. Brenda, Jackie, Jane and I took turns being in the room standing at the foot of the bed with Barbara, holding her, being supportive to her. Barbara stood in the room at the foot of the bed holding Mike's feet, kissing his toes, telling him to keep fighting and make it through this, telling him how much he is needed and loved, and how proud she is to have him in her life and what a great father he is.

I got a nearby motel room so Barbara and I could rest and be nearby. We stayed there from 4 a.m. until 11:30 the next day. Neither of us could sleep but it gave us a retreat where we could just rest quietly, retreat from the trauma and take a shower. Our bodies were in total overdrive and it was very hard to unwind. Barbara and I went back on Monday to see Mike and he was stable and in the hands of a very competent nurse, Amy. He had to be put back on a high dose of steroids because of the scarring of his lungs. The steroids are to prevent new scarring from forming. If the scarring progresses he will not survive. The settings are turned all the way back up on his respirator and he is back on 100% oxygen. He received more blood transfusions and was going to have dialysis when we left. He opened his eyes and looked at Barbara when she said she was going and puckered up his lips for a kiss which he got! I took Barbara home and came back to Ontario. It turned out I was awake 39 hours before I got to go have a good night’s sleep.

It’s very draining to keep going through these near death experiences with Mike. He miraculously hangs on each time. He really wants to live.