7/29 – Sunday Afternoon Update

Hi prayer warriors! THANK YOU for stepping up to the plate to pray when I sent out the request on FB this morning. If you are not already a part of Gideon’s prayer FB page, please join that group and feel free to share it with anyone who is praying for him. It’s the quickest and easiest way for me to send emergent prayer requests and quick updates so I will update that the most.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/158210648110517/

I’ll start with the prayer requests so if that’s all you want to read, you can see those and move on. For those of you interested, I’ll try to go into more detail below.

Prayer Requests
– reduced heart rate
– increased blood pressure
– no infection
– tolerance and stability to warming & reducing some medications
– return to a normal sinus rhythm
– comfort for him & peace of mind for us
– my big boys at my parents house & my parents.

The reason for the emergent prayer request this morning was because his blood pressure dropped to 50/30 (bad) and his heart rate got to 200 (bad). He is being paced with pacer wires and he fights the pacer and the drugs weren’t working. They had hoped to avoid giving him Amiodarone but gave him 5 individual doses of that in less than 60 minutes then put him on a drip to run continuoisly. That was at 8-9am this morning.  Right now, it’s 3:00pm and his heart rate is again overtaking the pacing wires and beating at 170 times per minute which is too high so they are calling the team back to come up with a new plan.

I have a page of notes from rounds this morning that I was going to share but I’ve lost the motivation to explain it all now. Since last night, they have added back the catheter because he didn’t pee even after multiple doses  of lasix (bummer), taken him back to full respiratory support on the vent (bummer), added a TON of new meds to support him from a cardiac, pain management & sedation standpoint (bummer), they have cooled him more down to 93.92 degrees farenheit (bummer) & increased his fluids (bummer). Even with all of that support, they still can not manage his heart rate. He is in what they call “JET” rhythm, which is junctional ectopic tachycardia meaning his heartrate is being generated by his ventricles rather than his SA or AV nodes which would be the normal or backup way the heartbeat should generate. His rate is 180-200 on his own which is not acceptable so they are trying to pace him down to 150 and eventually 140 or 130 but they can’t even get him down to 160 yet today.

The positive for today is that he had his chest tube removed so hopefully he is more comfortable now, even though he is so drugged on sedation drugs, paralytics & pain meds, he really should just be seeing rainbows, roses & unicorns and that’s all. They tested his blood for signs of infection and that test came back with a 0 result which is awesome. Being febrile (hot) is normal after this kind of surgery for your body to recover so he is laying on an electric cooling blanket with ice packs around him to keep him cool. He is very cold to the touch. It’s sad but I’m not really allowed to touch him right now anyways because heat throws his heart out of whack.

That’s all I have for now. Thank you for the continued prayers. I do read each and every one of the comments on the blog and hope to just keep his updates on his prayer page to keep it in 1 place for me to see it all rather than sharing on mine or Bo’s personal pages. I want to see every comment so I won’t be sharing on our personal pages anymore after this blog so I can try to keep up with everything so again, please join the group for future updates. We truly can’t thank you enough for the prayer support and I’ll try to do my best to keep the requests up to date and specific for you.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/158210648110517/