What's another 10 days?

*sigh* :(

Today they came by to take bloodwork before and after they administer James' Gentamicin antibiotic (he's on two new ones) to determine if the dose is appropriate. This caused a little lightbulb to go on.

• If they need to watch the antibiotic that closely can it be given orally so we can be home??
• The answer: NO.
• And how many days do they administer these antibiotics?
• 10 days.

Given James does not have a PICC or PORT (something we are reconsidering ... see here,and here for previous thoughts on this) he can't go home with an IV. A PICC could be put in, but they basically said they did not think he was a candidate for going home. The nurse said they don't usually send home people on Gentamicin. The doctors said they would discuss these things further next week if these new antibiotics actually work, but at this time it's quite apparent that whether they work or not, we will not be going home anytime soon.

The stool test for c.diff did not work and they have to redo it. So we'll have to wait a couple more days for that. In itself we're not too majorly concerned, although the result does stand in the way of some of our other concerns. As I've mentioned before we find ourselves venting James excessively; we're also finding we get mucas or foamy phlegm (similar to what's in his lungs) out of his g-tube when he vents. At night or first thing in the morning I open his tube for a period of time to see what we get out on an empty stomach. In a 10 minute period this morning I got over 15mls of foamy phlegm. This leaves several questions. It's possible that he is swallowing some of the stuff in his lungs, which is not uncommon ... but if his lungs are supposedly relatively clean of the PAP why are we still getting so much "foam" out of his stomach? Is it possible that he's not actually swallowing this stuff but that because of the inbalance in his body he's producing it in his stomach?(???) The doctors have said this doesn't happen, so it's from the lungs. So why does James have so much mucas in his diapers? All this time we've thought his colitis isn't under control and have been working with his formula to try help. So what is it, his colitis out of control, or is this mucas coming from his stomach which is coming from his lungs?

How can we hopefully find some answers? By doing an endoscopy and/or colonoscopy. The problem is that c.diff causes colitis to flare up, so if we were to do such a test now and his colitis is flared up we would not know if this is from the c.diff or if it's been that way for a long time. So we have to wait until we have a clean stool that clears him of having c.diff and then we can consider doing such tests. At the same time we're not all that eager to put James out again just for the sake of these tests. It would be good to have the answers, but not really going to make a huge difference in his treatment. This is something we'd be more interested in lining up so that if he requires an aneasthetic for any reason in the future we can coordinate it all to be done at the same time.