And so it continues

On Wednesday Ron's foot was nice and pink - kind of like a good package of hamburger (sort of graphic, but that's what it looks like). The nurses said that's what they want to see and if it was gray they'd be concerned that it's not getting good blood supply.

They had a hard time getting a good suction on the wound vac and Wednesday evening I had to retape it. If the machine is sounding like bull frog, there's a leak somewhere. You want the machine to run as quietly as possible. After I added more tape to his foot it ran almost entirely without making any noise.

The nurse who usually comes to change his dressing was not available on Friday so someone else came out. She told him that his wound was gray in color (where it had been nice and pink on Wednesday) so he got worried about that. So… I had to call the on-call nurse yesterday because he’d worked himself up into an anxiety attack over the whole thing. She had me take the wound vac dressing off and just put on a wet-to-dry dressing. That’s just wet 4x4 pads on the wound and then covered with dry pads and wrapped in gauze. I was able to get the wound to pink up by washing it with a wet 4x4 pad so that was a good sign. When I called her back this morning to report how it looked she wanted me to keep the wet-to-dry dressing on and let the doctor look at it in the morning. The wound vac may have had too much pressure being exerted on the wound because he’s not draining as much fluid any longer. Maybe tomorrow the doctor will decide he doesn’t need the wound vac any longer and we can send it back to the company.

I don't know. It does sound kind of strange that it went from a good pink to a gray color in just a couple of days. Yesterday and today Ron's not felt very well and I think he's dehydrated. He decided to cut his Lasix in half from 160 mg twice a day to 80 mg twice a day. His skin looks very dry and he was getting some muscle cramps. As long as his weight is staying down and he doesn't swell back up again, then it's good to get the Lasix dosage down. Too much for too long can cause kidney damage and we don't want that. He has enough problems with that without any help from medication.

We shall see tomorrow what the doctor has to say.