| TXJess |
12-16-2008 11:59 PM |
It's been a rough day...
This is going to be sort of long but I just have to get everything out so I can at least stop crying for today so I can get some sleep...
My step father (who was better than my own father) was sick for several weeks with flu like symptoms. Yesterday he went to the doctor because he just wasn't getting over it and they weren't overly concerned and did a little blood work.
At 3:30 this morning he was able to make it to the living room and woke my mom up; he had collapsed on the floor. So needless to say they checked into the hospital at 4:30 am. My mom thought it was dehydration which might have been the initial problem. However when they got to the hospital he kept getting worse and his blood pressure was ridiculously low at 76/44 or so. Eventually he became so delirious he couldn't tell where he was or who my mom was.
Then they looked at his leg and saw that it had swollen to about twice the normal size and had started to discolor. They thought it was a blood clot then they thought infection and they went back and forth with these two ideas for a long time. They finally moved him to ICU for continually monitoring where it was determined they needed to get him stable (blood pressure, vitals etc) then they would head into surgery to see if it was a clot and open it or if it was an infection and try to remove part of it. As time passed while making this decisions his health degenerated more and more until finally they went into OR without him being stable running the high risk of heart attack, stroke or likely death.
He did make it through that surgery but they had to amputate his leg. They informed us he had "necrotizing fasciitis" or what it's commonly called is flesh-eating bacteria. The awful news is this has possibly spread to his other leg and they'll probably do surgery on it tonight as well and possible amputation. And for the next week or so he has to be kept completely sedated and taken into surgery once a day to keep removing the infection until it no longer comes back. The mortality rate for this type of infection is around 70-80%.
I have never seen anything like this my entire life but apparently it's becoming more frequent. When they started explaining it it sounded like something that would be on Eleventh Hour or House or some TV show.
I'm sorry to unload but I really really needed to for my sanity. I hope tomorrow we get some better news.
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