New digs

Wren has been moved into his new temporary home.  It's in the Intermediate ICU, meaning that the nurses are in the room with the patients.  Wren doesn't actually need this; it's just the only bed that was available.  The bad news is that this means they might move him again when a normal floor room becomes available, but the good news is that Shannon and I don't feel we're obligated to have at least one of us in the room at all times so he doesn't wake up alone.

The room is quite an upgrade.  There's a bathroom en suite, so we don't have to climb the stairs to another floor anymore.  The incessant beeping of the monitors is gone, and he's upgraded from a VHS player to a DVD.  Maybe his next room will have Blu-Ray.  There's also a recliner next to his bed.

Most of his tethers are gone.  The lines in his neck and his right arm are out, and the line in his left arm isn't attached to a drip.  He just has the wires to the electrodes monitoring his heart rate and breathing, the wire to the pulseox on his toe, and the big impediment: his chest tube.  Those are all long enough that (as long as we're careful) we can pick him up out of bed.  Shannon held him in the recliner while we fed him dinner (a smorgasbord of mac n' cheese, broccoli, green beans, sprite, chocolate pudding, and lemonade). 

 We're hoping to get the chest tube out early tomorrow.  There's been a bit of a mixup in the record keeping.  Apparently in the ICU they monitor his tube output in a hand ledger, and there was an arithmetic error along the way that made it seem his output was much, much larger than it really was.  Shannon and I were sure there had been almost nothing out of it recently, but they were claiming he'd put out 40ccs, which was nonsense.  They found the error, and solved it by putting a negative entry in to square it, but that just confused the next shift of nurses on the floor and now they're still screwed up in the count.  I'm convinced that if they had the numbers right he would have had the tube out today.  It's minor compared to all of the other things that can go wrong in recovery, but the chest tube is my least favorite of his leashes and I'm looking forward to it going away.

Shannon took many pictures of Wren in his new room, but somewhere along the way he poked the camera too hard and the memory stick came loose, so none of the pictures were ever saved.  You'll have to take my word that they were adorable.

[Edited by Shannon to say:] Actually, I didn't know they put in a negative number. I thought they just figured out the error BUT tonight they told me he had put out 140CC (not 40!!!) in 24 hours which is what he did on the very first day post-operatively. I think that he really did 40CC in the 24 hours before morning rounds but almost nothing today. I asked the nurse to check it and work out the true number.]