Just one strain?

The infectious disease doctor is pretty sure that both of Denise's infections will turn out to be the same organism, and that it will be responsive to the antibiotics (insert sigh of relief here). He showed me the lab results yesterday for the lung & blood infections, and explained (as best as he could to this numb-skull) the tube result ratios, sensitivity, resistance, intermediate responses, and other goodies (microbiologists out there, please forgive my lack of proper jargon). He feels that that the results are close enough for the supposed resistance of the lung infection culture to be within an acceptable margin of error for the lab.
Good: just one kind of organism to deal with, and there are antibiotics.
Bad: infections in the blood & lung are never good; Denise is very sick.

She's had a nasal gastro tube inserted 3 times over the past few days because of all the vomit. She pulled one out all by herself and the other was removed when she was doing better for a while (then they had to put one in again last night). Speaking of pulling things out, she's on her 3rd PICC line.

Denise reached her arms up to give a nurse a hug the other day, and she said that it made everything up to this point worth it. The other day a nurse told me that I could rub lotion on Denise's back & around her bed sore. I like being involved as much as possible, and it makes me feel like I'm doing something to help Denise out. Anyway, in addition to getting more circulation going to heal that bed sore, they also put on some fake skin stuff and put in a ConvaTec Flexi-Seal Fecal Management System (if only they had an online manual that I could link you to). Denise is the first person they're trying it with. Here's a snippet from the web site:
"Flexi-Seal diverts and contains fecal waste, protecting the patient's skin, to help prevent the risk of skin breakdown and infection from fecal matter. Flexi-Seal Fecal Management System contains a soft silicone catheter assembly. The soft catheter is inserted into the rectum and retained using a low pressure retention balloon."
Funny... they told me that balloons weren't allowed in the CCU.

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