Hey Guys, it’s Jordan again.
Here’s an update on Tam.
We are now at Butterworth Hospital downtown. After giving Tammy A LOT of medications to get her pain under control and running several tests last night they found out that Tammy has inflammation in her lungs called radiation pneumonitis. I guess this can be pretty painful. They gave her some pretty heavy doses of a steroid last night for this but needed her to be seen by a thoracic surgeon on this which they didn’t have staffed at Blodgett, so we were sent by ambulance to Spectrum Butterworth, which we didn’t really feel was needed. However I guess it is protocol.
They also said that she has subcutaneous emphysema which is when some of the air leaks out of the chest tube and gets stuck between the muscles. For her it is in between the muscles behind her shoulder and in her left side under her arm. This too is really painful and can move around a bit from the incision/lung site so this could explain a lot of what Tam is experiencing in her chest as well. In addition we were told that they saw some apical scaring on the lung and that there was still a small pneumothorax present after the chest tube was removed in addition to a UTI because of being repeatedly straight-cathed last week after the surgery. They are hoping that the small pneumothorax and the subcutaneous emphysema heals on it’s own in time and she is receiving high strength IV meds for the UTI. We are being told that some of this is common (finally) and can be happen with chest tubes, so they are hoping it resolves itself. We just really need to get the inflammation and the painful subcutaneous emphysema take care of.
As of now, we are still waiting to see a Thoracic Surgeon. Tammy is still in a lot of pain, but she doesn’t want to take all the meds they are suggesting because she want’s to be with it when the Doctor comes in so she is again smiling and making the best of spending a few more days in the hospital but off the record she is pretty funny on the meds. At this point we are being told we will be here until at least tomorrow, but we are hoping to get home as soon as we can. We are both missing a little girl who has been hanging with her Grandma’s for the past week.
