Day +50: unexpected drama

Halfway to the magic 100-day mark. Mina Brigitta decided she didn't want this landmark to pass quietly. At about 3 AM, I noticed that the stress loop had come out of the dressing on Mina Brigitta's Broviac catheter. I hesitated, not wanting to wake it up, but finally decided to buzz the nurse to fix it. She arrived and couldn't find the tubes! They were all the way across on the other side of the bed. Her Broviac had come all the way out! The nurse pushed the "emergency" button, and within 30 seconds we had about 8 people in the room. At first they thought the line had broken off and left a piece inside, but an X-ray showed that it had come out in one piece. I would have probably been more panicked about it if I hadn't watched them remove one last year. Usually, it just comes right out, and the vein closes up with hardly any bleeding, and that's what happened last night.

We'd been having trouble with the old line being tugged out for quite a while. The hardest time came in the ICU, when her skin was all covered with Aquafor and we had trouble getting the tape to stick to her skin. After both the stitch and the cuff came out, the tape was the only thing holding it in. The strange thing is that Amber came into the room at about 4:30 and asked if I'd called Keri. I hadn't, but Keri was awake with Isaac and had called the floor to ask that the nurse check on the stress loop. It's also ironic that this all happened not three hours after I'd written about what an uneventful day we had.

She still had to get her meds, so they had to put a peripheral IV line into her foot. The fellow from the ICU came up to do it, the same one we had battled about placing sticky heart leads on Mina Brigitta's broken skin. He was happy to see her looking so well, and placed the line on the first try. Everyone was so amazed at how brave Mina Brigitta was. The single line worked for a while, but she still needed a central line, so she went into surgery at about 3:30 PM today for placement of a new line. Everything went just fine, and Mina Brigitta came out of the surgery in better shape than I've ever seen her. She's getting stronger and stronger.