Daily Nathan Update
For those of you who are just joining us, here are some of the details of Nathan's problem. The doctors believe that the clot in Nathan's right atrium is infected with a moderately easy-to-treat strain of Staph. Since the antibiotics can't treat the clot for the infection, Nathan will continue to have the infection until the clot begins to break down. So far the clot itself hasn't been causing Nathan any problems, other than keeping him sick. But if we can't clear the infection soon, the bacteria will start to do some real damage. Everything is more complicated because Nathan is so young.
Today was kind of an up and down day. This morning's heart echo again showed no change in the clot's size, so they increased the dosage on the TPA from 0.05 cc to 0.1 cc. Kind of a downer, but they had intentionally left some wiggle room on the dosage in case of this sort of thing. They've been watching Nathan like hawks since he started this new treatment and Katie and I are very grateful for that.
The first pick-me-up came when we learned that Nathan's blood cultures had not grown any of the staph bacteria yet. All of his earlier blood cultures had come back really quickly. A fact that is related to the intensity of the bacteria in his blood. But I'm pleased to report that this blood culture remains clean as of the 36 hour mark. We need no growth for 48 hours on two separate blood cultures to call it truly clean, and it will be pretty unexpected if this first one does not come back "positive". But, this seems to be a sign that the infection is weakening. This is something that was not expected to happen until the clot began breaking down, so something's going on in there!
A brain scan following the increase in the TPA showed that everythings fine up there, and there is no evidence of any other harmful bleeding in Nathan's body. The preliminary report on tonight's heart echo is that the clot is definitely more mobile, but not necessarily any smaller. This is both comforting and scary. Any sort of change means that the clot is being affected, but we don't want it to break free of the wall of Nathan's heart and travel to his lungs. That would be catastrophic.
Katie and I have said prayers, and have faith, that nothing like that will happen at all, and that the final readings of the heart echo will show that the clot is indeed smaller. We hope you will join us in those prayers and that faith.
-Tim
comments
It's great to hear some mostly good news, and it gives us strength and encouragement to keep praying!