Still Miles to Go

I want to start out by thanking our Brandeis math friends (and significant others) for keeping us entertained last night with a few rounds of the game Dominion. I’m incredibly grateful that you were around to keep my mind off the reasons I’m still inpatient and rather focused on some fun!

I especially appreciate the distraction as yesterday was not the most pleasant day. I started the day finding out my potassium levels were critically low. (And how the medical team didn’t know that they were even getting low beats me.) I was started off on a bag of potassium. I finished it 4 hours later and had my blood drawn again. Potassium levels were still critical and magnesium levels were incredibly low as well. Two more bags added to my IV pole. Blood drawn at the end of those. Potassium rose to 2.9 (low “normal” is 3.5). Another bag hung through the night. Blood drawn and TPN hooked up overnight. Four hours later blood was drawn again. Potassium went down! Needless to say, I’m hooked up to yet another bag of Potassium in addition to the TPN. This had better work!

The low Potassium levels have certainly been taking effect on my body. My heart has been doing some crazy things. Not only have I been rapidly swinging from tachycardia (high heart rate) to bradycardia (low heart rate), but I’ve also been skipping beats pretty regularly. My hospitalist thinks this will likely improve with my electrolyte levels so it’s nothing to be too concerned about – yet. We’ll revisit the issue once my electrolyte levels have improved.

On to the good new… Yesterday, they finally placed a PICC line so that I could get some IV nutrition (TPN – which looks like melted marshmallow fluff) while waiting for the GJ tubes to help. An added advantage of the PICC line is that all that blood that they’ve been drawing over the past 30 hours has been able to come straight from the PICC – no more sticks!!! And once the GJ tube is in and properly working, we can pull the PICC line.