It's Negative, Gram Negative

Time takes on a completely different characteristic when it is spent in an ICU.  You can't use your cell phone, so you have hardly any contact with the outside world.  You sit in a small isolation room with machines beeping and the lights always on and wait for time to pass until you realize that the day is almost over.

Today, Averi sat in bed with her arms in restraints, a tube down her throat, and her eyes glossed over.  She had moments when she was slightly awake, but even those were broken up by her eyes falling shut.  Sometimes she would try to cry, but no sound ever came out even though her face was scrunched up and tears came out of her eyes.  It was officially the most depressing thing I have ever seen.

(Dan got to hold her for a few minutes while they changed her bedding.)

The doctor came in at one point and told us that the results had come back from the cultures taken when Averi spiked a fever.  It was growing a bacteria known broadly as Gram Negative.  We later found out that it's pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacteria found in the lungs when a person has pneumonia, but hardly ever seen in the blood.  Leave it to Averi to grow bacteria in the wrong places.

While there's no way to prove where this bacteria came from, I have a pretty good idea.  On Thursday when Averi was in the recovery room for her biopsy, the nurse plugged some medicine into her port without cleaning it with alcohol first.  The broviac is a direct line into her heart and the ports should be scrubbed for 15 seconds, wiped, and then allowed to dry for 30 seconds before anything is hooked onto them.  She'd already done it before I could stop her and now I'm beating myself up about it.  Ahhhh!

(Averi has really taken to this doll that a friend recently gave her.  She sits and fiddles with the hair on it until she falls asleep.)

Averi's G-tube site has also gotten really nasty.  It was red after the last time she went to the OR and was just starting to look better until she returned from the biopsy.  Now it is black at the site, red around the site, warm to the touch, and hard when you push on it, which makes her very upset.

Luckily, the nurse took Averi's arms out of the restraints for a little bit while we were in the room and Averi some how managed to get her thumb into her mouth.  She never once tried to pull on the ventilator tube and was perfectly happy just to have her thumb for a while.