Date sent: 11/01/99 05:49 PM
Have you ever been on a train....

and watched the stations going by one by one? You begin to wonder when the train is going to stop for your stop. Dan used this analagy today in relation to this on-going saga.

Today, we found out that yes, indeed there is bacterial infection in the cyst fluid aspirated. "Fortunately" it is a bacteria known to be very responsive (susceptible?) to penicillian. The course of action is for Dan to be on 4 to 6 weeks of IV antibiotics. He will get them through a "pic" iv line. Basically this means that he will have a long iv tube inserted, under sterile conditions so that it can stay in the entire time. "Fortunately", this kind of thing "happens all the time..." so that he can go home and have iv nurses come to the house to flush the line and start the next course. This will be done every day since the prescription is to have the drug every four hours, so I guess they set the drip to run continuously.

Sigh, what does this mean in the short term? They will do an MRI in the next 24 hours, and then see how things are progressing by Thursday. On Thursday we will begin to talk about discharge planning. We will get another image in "3 to 4 days". So, Dr. Black thought that we would be talking about the weekend or early next week. Also, Dr. Black said that if any of these images show accumulation of fluid they can drain it again through the port that he left in. And, if we go back to Ohio, and later see accumulation, he would be ok with someone else draining it through the port.

We had two long conversations with the infectious disease doctors that Dr. Black called in to consult about this infection. I told them that Dr. Black had said right after the surgery that it didn't look like any infection was there. They said that is a good sign in terms of long term health and any damage that might have been caused by a really bad infection. They also said that it could have been introduced during the initial surgery or from inside. The most effective tool against this bacteria is to have the cyst drained and the site cleaned, which we did. Then run the antibiotics. They use them for so long because the brain is hard to get stuff into, since it (the blood brain barrier) is designed to keep stuff out....

Dan says "we are still trying to find out the cosmic reason we keep winding up in Boston.... and are trying to take care of our kids from a distance... living in a hospital seems commonplace now... everytime it seems like it's time to get off (this train) something else comes up... squeeze the kids for us..."

With love and exhaustion, Abi and Dan


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