Its been a rough few days. On Tuesday Patrick was having issues with his blood pressure dropping, and then that evening his blood pressure and oxygen dropped low. They got him stable, but by morning he was really bad. They called at 8 to tell me that they were putting him back on the breathing tube and by 9 we were afraid we were losing him. His oxygen levels were really bad and even with the breathing tube they couldn't get them much higher than 82. The realized right away that he was hemorrhaging into his lungs, and thought he had a blood clot in his lungs. They put him on the ECMO (lung bypass) maching to buy him time to figure out what was going on and the best way to deal with it.
After getting him somewhat stable they took him down for a CT scan. This showed that he did not have a clot, but he did have something in his airway. After scoping his lungs they found that he had a large blood clot. They tried to remove it Wednesday night but where having a lot of problems, so decided to wait until morning and take him into the OR.
Tuesday was a rough day, but nothing compared to Wednesday morning. Nurse started calling me around 2 AM telling me that he was bleeding into his lungs again. Then called around 2:30 to tell me that they were going to take him into the cath lab to see if they could block off the arteries/vessels that were bleeding. At 3 AM the doctor called me for a consent. At 3:45 the nurse called again and said that they were getting ready to take him to the cath lab, and less than 10 minutes later they called telling me I had to get to the hospital as soon as possible.
When I got there one of the doctors, one of my favorite ones, told me that Patrick was about as sick as he could get. They were having a hard time putting the ventilator in because of all the blood in his lungs. They finally got it in and took him back to the cath lab.
Around 6:30 AM the doctor came out and said that it went perfectly. That they were able to go in and block off the bleeders, and stop the bleeding. Then they took him back to the OR around 11:30 to clean out his lungs. When I signed the consent form, the doctor told me it would be about an hour. That hour turned into 4 hours. They were able to clean him out but everything going on in his lungs to do so caused them to start bleeding again.
I called at 9 PM for an update and was told that compared to last night that he's stable.
Today, March 30th, they are taking him back into the OR to clean out some more blood clots out of his lungs. They were able to go down a little on the ECMO and he seems to be tolerating it. Hopefully this is the last OR trip and we can work towards letting his lungs heal and getting him back on his road to recovery.
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