Veteran's Day

As it does for many of you, Veteran's Day takes on a different tune for me this year. Living the military life and being around military families constantly, it's easy to forget the danger and sacrifice the military endure. We live our lives day in and day out and chalk it up as "This is my husband's job." What you don't take into account (and maybe this is a coping mechanism) is that when they are on foreign soil, there are people out there who hate America and what we stand for. It's not until something like this affects our family directly do you truly realize how amazing and selfless our military men and women are. Rob would often tell me, "This is just my job. I chose to do this." This is true. He felt very strong about his reasons for being deployed. But, if it weren't for Rob and all those other men and women, I would not be able to so freely write about our experiences on this blog site. So, THANK YOU to all those serving and who have served. It makes me so proud. Now, on to updates about Rob. Early this morning they took him off his sedation medicine. They called it a "sedation vacation" (clever, huh?). He was still pretty knocked out most of the day. I tried so hard to get him to wake up. At one point I told him "Rob, you may be stubborn, but I can be more stubborn than you and I WILL wake you up." So, we'll see who wins this battle!!!! When they were cleaning him up, the nurse told me that he did open his eyes for a few seconds for her. As always, his body is really slow with metabolizing out the meds so it's going to take him a little longer to get the sedation medicine out. It's so frustrating because by tomorrow he'll probably be a little more alert and then he goes off to surgery again. His surgery tomorrow consists of washing out the wounds and replacing his current feeding tube with a different kind that also has a NG suction attached. This way he can get rid of the NG tube that's currently in his nose. YEAH! Also today they took out the other chest tube so he's getting closer to fewer and fewer tubes attached to him. The doctor I spoke with today said that his creatine level is high. A lot of this has to do with all that muscle breakdown going through his kidneys. She did say he is in "acute kidney failure." However, he does not meet the criteria for dialysis because his body is getting rid of fluid appropriately, it's just slow at doing it. So that's good news. His urine output is also at a decent level. After all his body has gone through I think he's doing pretty darn good. The doctor agreed! He also may have some pneumonia. It looked like the secretions they got out of his trach suction were pretty thick so they are doing tests for that. He has been on antibiotics so hopefully if he does have it, it's not too severe and they can get it cleared up quickly. It's pretty hard to avoid this with him being bedridden and getting so much fluid. But, pneumonia is the last thing he needs on top of everything else. They also found what they call the "war bug" in some of his sputum and leg wounds which they are also treating with antibiotics. It's just going to take a lot of time and tweaking to get his body running efficiently and back to it's old self. I'm going to go back to the hospital tonight to see him. Hopefully he'll be a little more responsive. I mean, seriously, he'd never let me sleep in on the weekends, so I'm not going to let him continue to sleep away.......Keep the prayers coming!!!!!!!!