Bunn’s Prairie

So after a week and a half in the hospital here’s what happened. She got a staph infection in her blood, a different infection in bladder, and some bleeding around her liver. The 2 infections are being treated by oral antibiotics (luckily) but we had to remove Kaley’s port-a-cath which was contaminated with the staph bacteria. We’re backing off on Kaley’s preventative blood thinners for the time being and letting her liver recover on it’s own. We suspect some trauma probably caused that, but there is no way to track down exactly what happened. As long as the blood infection doesn’t linger in that bleeding, Kaley will be fine. If it does, it may mean surgery to drain the bleeding, but we have no reason to believe that will happen at this point.

We had some tough conversations about what procedures we wanted to do and deciding if hospice care was appropriate. In the end, she has a blood infection which required removing her port-a-cath (think easy IV access hardware left under the skin). So we removed it today, and will treat the infection, and then _not_ replace it. This last part was a revelation for us (that maybe she didn’t need it anymore). She also has some bleeding going on around her liver. We don’t know what caused that, but are assuming some trauma of some sort (no one is fessing up to know anything about it however). We took her off her preventative blood thinners to let her liver heal. Just need time now, I think.

To borrow a phrase that Kaley used often, she is “indoors” for the time being. She’ been running a low grade fever for about a week and had some odd blood work come back this past week. Therefore her doctor decided it’s best for her to be admitted. Time to test out ACR’s (ACR->group home company) policy of having a staff member in Kaley’s room 24/7 while she is in-patient because it’s the right thing to do (not because they’re being paid (they’re not)). So far so good.