Update on Randy

I'm so thankful to everyone who has expressed concern and love towards my brother and my family.

It has been a very trying experience to say the least.

And its been much harder on my poor parents than on me.

 

Randy was moved out of the ICU at the end of day 2. It was discovered that he now had pneumonia. His breathing was labored.

 My brother Jeff had been at the hospital, hanging out and watching over Randy from 9-3:30 on Saturday. I took over from 3:30-10 PM. During my time there, a respiratory therapist came in to put a tube down his nose, down his throat, to suck out some of the gunk there that was making it so hard for him to breathe. He resisted of course, and so I held his hand to help calm him down a bit. It seemed to work. She got some, and it helped for awhile. A physical therapist then came in and started moving Randy's arms and legs. He even sat Randy up in bed for a few minutes. I was impressed with Randy--he had just had BRAIN SURGERY for crying out loud!

Randy was fairly alert the whole time i was there. He would frequently open his eyes and look at me and he was trying so hard to get that itchy oxygen mask off his face!

 

I sat and read him Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone. Not sure if he enjoyed that, but I thought that would be nicer than a noisy TV on in the background.

 

By 9 O'clock the nurses switched shifts and for the first time since I had been there, they took his temperature :( Turns out the poor guy had a fever! Then they came in to do his medication and she was kind of all over the place. I don't know why, but I checked his catheter to make sure it was still on and it had been pulled out, he was sitting in a wet mess and no one had bothered to check. Then as I was leaving I went to say goodbye to him (my mom came to relieve me) and I noticed that his entire chest was SOAKED. Something was leaking and the nurse didn't check him about that either until I said something. I was so angry at people for not taking care of my brother the way he needed to be taken care of.

 

By the end of that night, Randy wasn't breathing well at all, and my mom talked to his doctors and they moved him back up into the ICU.

That's where he is now. There really isn't too much new information...my mom said he was kind of out of it today.

 

Here's hoping that he can come home by this weekend. My grandparents fly in on Friday, Joe has his farewell on Sunday, and he leaves home for 2 years on Wednesday. Crazy town over here people.