Re-Set

     Chris's niece, Samantha, posted the picture to the right on her Facebook today.   I saw it as I was sitting in the cafeteria this morning trying to process the information we were given this morning.  They brought him down at 9:00 to start dialysis and while we were there his nephroligist (Dr Cho, the new one for this week) came in and talked to us.   She was new to his case on Monday and is trying to figure out the cause of his kidney failure.   We remember her running a test on Monday that was so rare that that ICU nurses didn't even know what it was.   Apparently she was trying to rule out something, and well, the test came back positive.    As well, she took as second look at his kidney ultrasound and his kidney's are much larger than they should be.   She wants to do kidney biopsy to find out more information and possibly run some tests on his bone marrow.  We really thought that perhaps after today's dialysis we would be finding out more about when we might get back home, and hearing .  We thought we had put the most difficult part of this stay behind us, and really want to "re-start" but seem stuck in an endless loop where we keep trying to make headway but are stuck in an undertow that keeps pulling us back down. 

       After I came back from lunch the nurse came over and told us that the doctors wanted to increase his dialysis from 3 hours to 4.   They usually like to start out slowly and gradually increase it (his first session on Monday was 2 hours).   The nephrologist, Dr Cho came back to ask if we had made a decision about doing the biopsy.   He's still trying to recover from some very painful sores that have formed and been aggravated over and over from not being able to get comfortable in a bed and has thus been sitting in a chair.  He said it feels like he's sitting on thumb tacks, that certainly can't be helpful to healing.  He's exhausted and not getting hardly any rest and keeps asking to just let him go home to heal.   She pushed us to make a decision and we pushed back trying to figure out a solution to him being comfortable. 

      The afternoon brought visits from several teams again, his favorite being Bruce from PT who has been coming to wrap the swelling in his legs.   It's nice when at least one part of his body that has been in pain is getting some relief and healing.  One other positive is that one of our favorite CNA's from our stay in May, Kayla, was assigned to be his CNA today.   She was his with us right before his first tracheal stenosis surgery and then again before he finally came home.   She takes good care of both of us and makes being here a little less stressful. 

      Finally, after two weeks of asking for a solution to a comfortable bed, we finally found someone to listen and he's resting at least a bit more comfortably.   Here's to hoping that he'll be able to get a good night's rest and tomorrow we can try to "re-set".