An abundance of caution

The bad news is we're back in the hospital. The good news is that it's not serious, and if all goes according to plan we'll be home tomorrow.

On Friday, we had noticed that the top of Magnus's incision from his last surgery was somewhat redder than it had been. By Saturday morning, it was redder, raised, and seemed to have some pus in it. I e-mailed a photo of it to his cardiologist, who forwarded it to the surgeon who said that it looked like breakdown of the suture (normal) that was causing a bit of inflammation. They prescribed oral antibiotics and told us to clean the wound out with betadine, bandage it, and keep an eye on it.

On Sunday it was looking a little better, but then by yesterday afternoon, it had started oozing a little bit, and on top of that, he was showing symptoms of a mild cold. Iggy had been sick since Friday, so we weren't surprised, but we were a little nervous, so this morning, I e-mailed his cardiologist again and said that we wanted to bring him in. She squeezed him in at the clinic this morning, and she said she thought he looked better, but also wanted him to be looked at by one of the nurse practitioners who works with the surgeon. Our regular N.P. was busy with an emergency case, so we saw a different N.P. whom we'd met before but didn't know well. She also said she thought it looked better, but the surgeon, Dr. Azakie, was in a cautious mood and wanted him to be admitted to get IV antibiotics.

So here we are. He's had a dose of IV antibiotics and they cleaned his wound out and dressed it. In the course of cleaning it out, they opened it up a little bit so they want to make sure the wound looks "dry" tomorrow before they send us home. They also took some blood to do a white blood cell count (to check for inflammation) and it came back normal, which is great.

While we're not happy to be back at the hospital, it is kind of nice to have the monitors tell us how well he's doing! His oxygen sats are in the low to mid-80s, much higher than when he left the hospital. I had been a little worried about his sats since they lowered his diuretic dose a couple of weeks ago, but they're perfectly fine! And everyone has been impressed with how much weight he's gained. So hopefully, this is just a little blip and we go home tomorrow.