A Scary Night

Things were going relativley well last night. Paula was very tired and sleeping quite a bit. Steph was in a lot of pain, but that isn't uncommon for the donor. What made it bad was that the morphine was causing her breathing to slow, so they were only giving it to her every three hours. Well, the problem with that is that the amount of morphine they were giving her through her IV only lasts about one hour, so she would go from tolerable pain to untolerable pain pretty much the whole night. Then, at about 4:20 a.m., the CNA came in and got me to tell me that there were some problems with Paula. Right when I stepped out of the room I could tell it was serious. There were about a dozen people standing anxiously in the hall outside Paula's room and there were another dozen inside the room attending to her. Apparently when her nurse walked in at 4:00 am, Paula was gasping for air snd then she just suddenly stopped breathing. A code defcom 5 (or whatever they call it) was called and they had life-flight, ER, and trauma doctors up here. They sent her down to icu and prepped an O.R. They called Belnap (the doctor who did her surgery) and he came in to do an exploratory surgery. All her vitals were good except her hematocrit (a measure of how much blood she has). She had lost almost half of her entire body's blood. They quickly gave her a transfusion and got her into the O.R. at about 6:00 am. We found out that all the little incisions they had to make to put the kidney in were bleeding, but the drain tube got clogged with a blood clot resulting in pressure that cut off oxygen to the kidney which basically caused a whole chain reaction that caused her body to stop breathing. The doctors did everything that they could and it appears she is going to be alright. She had a ventilator (breathing machine) for most of the day, but Paula was still in high spirits. They took her off of the ventilator late this afternoon and she looks really good. The kidney is doing really well, better than what was expected. She is still in icu, but she is doing really well. Steph has been doing pretty well too. She has been getting more and more mobile, getting up to walk around. She still has a lot of pain, but they think it will really start to lessen by tomorrow and the doctor said that there might even be a possibility of her going home tomorrow. Some of you are probably wondering where Bentley is during all of this. Well, some kids just need to learn how to care of themselves before others (j/k). We've had the help of some great friends and family which has allowed me to stay at the hospital overnight. Thanks again to all those who have been there for us and for the prayers and thoughts of everybody.