August 26, 2018. After having spent an enjoyable evening in Johnson City, Stan and I left for Temple at 7:35 A.M. We arrived at my parents’ home at 9:40 A.M., unloaded the car, and headed to the hospital. Unfortunately, we just missed seeing the doctor during rounds. Dad was on dialysis, which had started at 6:00 A.M. Rachel, the dialysis tech, stopped by shortly after 10:00 A.M. to check on Dad, and said that he hadn’t put up any fuss when she started the SCUF dialysis session. I was glad that he was having more fluid removed and was encouraged that he could withstand the loss of the fluid while still maintaining adequate blood pressure. I had hoped that Natalie would be back as Dad’s nurse and was a little disappointed to see that the name Leslie had replaced hers.

Dad had slipped down the bed, and I used the call button to summon a nurse to reposition him. Instead of Leslie, a male nurse and a female aide entered the room. I immediately recognized the nurse as Fred and said that the last time that I had seen him, his wife had just had a child. He recognized me but said that he didn’t think that I was correct because his youngest daughter was three years old. When I told him that Dad had been a patient here in 2015, he said that he hadn’t realized that that much time had elapsed. It seemed like a mini-homecoming in some alternate life.

Dad talked a lot this morning, and most of what he had to say was pretty depressing. He said that he thought that he and Mom had changed mentally, and he implied that his life wasn’t worth saving. Today was the first day that he’d been talking since the surgery, and I asked him to wait another day before we discussed these serious topics. This talk was also upsetting Mom, and I wanted to redirect the conversation.

Because we had missed the morning rounds with the doctors, Leslie provided us with an update. They had changed his antibiotic, but his white blood cell count was still trending upward.  I told her that I had fed Dad some gruel on Thursday morning and was wondering if he could begin eating again. She said that she would try a bedside swallow test to see if he could swallow a pill. I told her that with his history of aspiration, we would prefer to have Speech involved in any swallow test. If she did do the bedside swallow test, I asked that she not use a straw, which changes the shape of the mouth during swallowing and can affect the test.

The nephrologist and his resident stopped by shortly after 11:00 A.M. The doctor asked Dad how he was doing, which was a mistake on his part because Dad started complaining about the hospital, beginning with his stay in 2015. When the doctor explained that Dad was having dialysis to remove fluid, Dad started to give him some attitude about having dialysis. While I was explaining to Dad about the stress that the excess fluid had on his organs and why he needed dialysis, the doctor left. I was certainly glad that Dad was awake and somewhat alert, but he was not the greatest patient in the world and was a bit challenging to control. When Dad asked me what we were going to do for the rest of the day, he got a little annoyed when I said that he was going to stay in bed. By 11:45 A.M., the cold of the hospital was beginning to bother Mom, so she and I went home for lunch.

When we returned to the hospital at 1:30 P.M., I was surprised to see that Dad was off of dialysis. Leslie said that because his fistula had clogged, they had stopped his session 90 minutes early. Still, they were able to remove 2,225 ml. During the past two days, just over 4 liters of fluid had been removed, and Mom and I saw a noticeable difference in the size and weight of his legs.

At 2:50 P.M., Dad had slid down in the bed, and I called for a nurse to reposition him. While the nurses were preparing to move him, they noticed that he was bleeding slightly from his fistula in his left arm. The moment that they moved him, it was like a dam broke and the fistula started bleeding—a lot. The nurses called for some assistance, and Angel, one of the hospital’s top 25 nurses, entered the room. When Angel called down to the dialysis center for advice on how to stop the bleeding, he was told to keep applying pressure until the bleeding stopped. When Rachel, the dialysis nurse, showed up at 3:05 P.M., she said that his fistula had seeped just slightly yesterday, but she saw no real bleeding. By 3:25 P.M. the bleeding had stopped, enabling the nurses to replace his bandages and change his gown and bed linens. About 30 minutes later, Christina, the dialysis resident, stopped by with Rachel to check the fistula.

At 4:30 P.M., Leslie stopped the Levophed drip, which had been keeping his blood pressure at a safe level. She had already reduced it to the lowest dosage earlier, and Dad had been maintaining a MAP of 79 (80 being perfect). Some 15 minutes later, his MAP had dropped to 68. As we left for the day, I hoped that Dad’s blood pressure would stabilize on its own and not dip below a MAP of 68.

As tired as we were when we left at 5:00 P.M., I dreaded leaving him alone. Historically, most of his problems developed when we weren’t there to watch over him. I was so anxious when I wasn’t with him that I was starting to rely on sleeping pills to sleep.