HOSPITAL / June 1st: Kathy had a restful night and Sunday Doctor Irani decided to move her from InterCare to a different part of the same department called Telemetry. If I understand it correctly, in a telemetry unit all the patients are monitored remotely in a separate room. A nurse on duty can see or hear when a patient is struggling. We could see her old room from the new room which was much sunnier and had a bit of a view. Mary and Trisha said I could go home for a while. The lawn was getting ridiculously tall so I wanted to mow it and trim the tall weeds growing in our walk.
I got home and greeted Marty and vice versa. I changed and started to mow. I have a Black and Decker rechargeable electric lawn mower. I think I’ve had it for over 5 years. For the most part I really like it, but when the grass is this tall I need to cut a little bit at a time. I got quite a bit of it done when my cell phone rang. Kathy had another breathing episode so they were moving her back to InterCare, and her same room. I put the mower away and drove back to Baystate.
Things settled down for a while. In this wing – InterCare and Telemetry – they do the deep suctioning with a nasal tube rather than through her mouth. I think the reasoning is that Kathy can’t bite the tube that sucks her if it bypasses her teeth. I think it may also reach different areas of lung gunk. Bill was the respiratory therapist we saw the most. He would do the suctioning and the mucus massaging thing on her back. But if she was sleeping peacefully he didn’t bother her. All this while antibiotics were working on the pneumonia.
When the night-time nurse, Star came on duty she said that she was going to be inserting a nasogastric tube (NG) in Kathy. In order to put the stomach feeding tube in the right spot they needed to take a barium X-ray. And the only way to get the barium where it needed to go was through an NG tube. We were all panicking a bit because they had six unsuccessful attempts a few nights ago. We were dreading the trauma on Kathy. But Star said unless the barium was completed by midnight Kathy couldn’t get the feeding tube Monday morning.
As it turned out this tube insertion was a piece of cake. She used a small pediatric NG tube sent up from the ER. Then they did a quick X-ray to confirm the NG tube had reached the right destination. Finally, barium was injected down the tube; up her nose and into her stomach.