24 Sept

We last saw Colin yesterday at 11 and mom says when she saw him today his position was pretty unchanged. Still quite swollen and giving him medication to keep the urine production going and very heavily sedated. Its important to get him off the respirator asap but today being a public holiday he'll have to wait until tomorrow before the specialist sees him and makes an assessment. Thanks for your good wishes "middle child", Alison, Francois and Sunette - yes ARDS is a monster - I'd never heard of it before but it seems to actually be quite common, especially with multiple injuries and especially when the lungs are involved. I wonder whether Colins lungs were not involved initially - when you see the break in his upper arm, right in the shoulder joint it's not difficult to imagine a huge shock to the lungs,but I'm just speculating, it doesn't appear to have to start with trauma to the lungs. At this stage it's one day at a time and back to reporting second hand via mom in PE.
Although I'm certainly not qualified to comment, it seems to me strange that the hospital rotates nursing staff in the ICU, so that each day a different person will nurse diferent patients. I would have thought that it would be important to have first hand knowledge of a long term patients history - for instance the swelling doesn't necessarily look shocking to someone who doesn't know Colin, because it takes on his body's proportions, but to someone who had seen him previously it would be immediatelly noticeable. (he looks like he could weigh 95 kg, instead of his normal 75) I understand that in some hospitals they try to keep nurses with patients because they become familiar with the patient's history. I suppose there must be very good reasons why this hospital has adopted this regime. I suppose that one benefit of many nurses attending to one patient over a period of time is that you have many eyes and minds considering the same patient - there are probably benefits to both systems.
Will report more tomorrow. Keep up those good vibes and if any of you have some room for improvement, give some thought to looking after your lungs better - they are our primary interface with the world.