Day 8: Discharge

i have just been discharged from the hospital. that's the good news. most of the rest of this is the not-good news.

it looks like the bacteria that made up the abscess was a new one to my body. it is still pseudomonas, but a different strain than was present in my lungs/body before the transplant. and no one has any idea where it came from. one theory was a esophageal tear, but there is no evidence of that. another was that the infection migrated from the left anastamosis when the stent was removed, but the location of the abscess makes that very unlikely. so i am left with a very drug-resistant bacteria, no real explanation as to how it got there, and no confirmation that the drugs i'm taking will kill it. we should know from the lab results if the bacteria is resistant to the colistin i am on in the next few days. but all this is a troubling development, as dr h put it.

so i am home, but i am looking at 6 weeks of IV and oral antibiotics. also i have a small rubber tube, a penrose drain, sticking out of my neck and secured with a safety pin. no joke. dad gets the pleasure of retracting it an inch every two days until it is all the way out. that should take a week or less. meanwhile the drugs and the hospital stay have left me kind of dizzy. not sure exactly what that's about, or if it's going away anytime soon.

in related news, today is three months and one day since the transplant. it's about the time i expected all the major recovery issue to be wrapping up. go figure.