Hospital stay over, for now

Day 5 in the hospital and I am waiting for my discharge papers. It's been an interesting stay though.

As I said, I got admitted for acute renal failure that we all assumed was a result of the colistin I was on to combat the infection that I had surgically drained on my previous stay. So when I got here, they stopped all the antibiotics and started pumping me full of IV fluids in order to flush out my kidneys. Slowly but surely, my kidney function has been trending positively and is on the verge of being completely normalized. So that's good.

While they were waiting to see if the fluids were working, I had an ultrasound of my kidneys, to make sure there was not a physical problem with the kidneys that might be causing the renal failure. As expected, everything there was normal.

So into the next test. Since they had stopped the antibiotics, the doctors wanted to be sure that there was no infection growing where the abscess had been, so they ordered a CT of my chest and neck. Well the area where the abscess had been looked improved, but they saw something they didn't like around my aorta: either a hematoma or an infection. Either one was likely the result of the abscess surgery, but while a hematoma would not be a big deal and would heal on it's own, an infection would be a major problem, especially since the antibiotics needed to fight it had done a number on my kidneys. So, more testing to figure out if it was an infection. Normally, they would have ordered a CT with contrast, but they didn't think my kidneys could take the contrast in their current condition, so I was headed to nuclear medicine.

In nuclear medicine they did a tagged white blood cell scan. Basically, they took 50ml of blood from me, separated the white cells, and tagged them with radioactive material. Then they reinject the white cells, wait a few hours and scan my chest to see if the white cells cluster anywhere. The idea is, since white cells attack infections in the body, the radioactive white cells would head for any infected area and you'd see a cluster of white cells on the scan. So if the white cells clustered around the suspect area of my aorta, that would mean that the abnormality on the CT scan is in fact an infection. For once, I dodged the bullet. The WBC scan came back negative for infection. In fact, the white cells did not even cluster around the old abscess region, so presumably there is no remaining infection there. The conclusion is that the spot on my aorta is a hematoma and the spot around the old abscess is just some inflamed tissue.

So the plan now is to discharge me today, without any antibiotics to make sure my kidneys can heal all the way. And then I'll have a follow-up CT with contrast in a couple weeks to make sure everything is a-okay.

I'll be heading back to NJ and moving out of the Philly apartment. And hopefully things will go a bit more smoothly now.