Goodish

Well, better than last night anyway. The good news is that John did not have a heart attack. The thought now is that he suffered what they call: Demand ischemia. Do not try to google that as any of the articles I found on the subject seem to have been written for doctors and are impossible to understand. They highly suspect pneumonia. They are not entirely sure what is causing the pneumonia. It may be fluid on his lungs due to the poor renal function. It can be caused by a type of bleeding due to the transplant. It can be caused by an infectious agent. This causes him to be short of breath and not taking in enough oxygen which in turn causes his heart to beat faster trying to get oxygen to his body which causes his blood pressure to drop and all of that caused his heart to go into atrial flutter or fibrillation. His body has been through a lot of shock with the transplant and the kidney failure. Even the dialysis is hard on the body. Last night things were scary for awhile. they did have to shock his heart back into a normal sinus rhythm. He did have enzymes in his blood that did indicate heart attack but these enzymes were not high and do show up with demand ischemia as this does cause slight damage to the heart.

They are going to do dialysis today as long as his blood pressure stays . They are going to be very careful and gentle with it so instead of four hours they are going to stretch it out into six hours. He will continue to get antibiotics and hopefully in a couple of days that will kick in and start to take care of his lungs.

John is in intensive care. The drug that they give to raise his blood pressure has to be monitored in ICU.