Prayer warriors....

I need your prayers for my brother-in-laws cousin.

Here is the email I got this morning from my baby sister!

**********************************************************************************
This is Greg's cousin that is going through cancer treatment. Please put him on your church prayer list. He is such a great guy. They would drop in at our new house when we were remodelling just to say hi and see how things were going. They are really great people.

This is the 2 recent entries from a journal that she is keeping online through a hospital service....

THURSDAY, APRIL 22, 2010 7:37 AM, CDT

Calling all prayer warriors. Art is a very sick man as his nurse told me this morning. They are doing dialysis but the machine keeps clotting and they have to change the tubing. His oxygen in his blood is in the 50-60 percent range even though the monitor says it is 90%. He has gained 15 lbs in fluid in the last 24 hours. So---we need the dialysis to work better and his lungs to work to take in more oxygen.

Please pray.

Connee



WEDNESDAY, APRIL 21, 2010 8:37 PM, CDT

What a day we have had. Very, very busy. We started the day with a broncoscopy with lavage. I think this is the correct spelling. This means they put some saline solution in his right lung and then drew some of that out. They will then set up some cultures and see what grows. They will know the results of these cultures in the next couple of days.

They did find the bacteria in his blood and put on yet another antibiotic. His temperature right now is NORMAL!!!! They have taken him off of one of the meds that was helping to keep his heart rate regular and have cut back on the med that keeps his blood pressure up. His heart now is a bit irregular but is still at less than 100 bpm. As long as this remains true they will not take any action. If the heart rate goes above 100 they will have to add the med back.

Since he has the infection in his blood they decided to remove the trifusion catheter that has been used for chemo, blood draws, transfusions and medication since we started here in January. The thinking was that it was contaminated with the bacteria. They then put in a new line in his neck in the jugular vein. They did some checking that this new line was working and then removed the old line.

His kidneys are not functioning or perhaps minimally functioning so tonight they are going to start him on dialysis at a very slow rate. This does not mean that he will be on this permanently and this not unusual for this to happen with transplant patients. In order to do the dialysis they had to put a port in his groin since both sides of his chest have now been used.

An echocariogram was also done and an ultrasound of his liver. These results will probably be available tomorrow sometime.
Fortunately, I had several visitors since I could not be in the room much of the time.

I'm spending the night again tonight but if everything goes well I may go home for a while in the morning.

I found out several more churches are praying for us that I didn't know about before today.

Please keep prayers coming. Hopefully Art will be off all this stuff by next week and we can tell him some of the funny things he did and said before he went on the ventilator. Those of you who know him well will appreciate that right before they started this procedure I entered his room and one of the nurses said, "Here's your wife." To which he replied, "That's not my wife, that's just a woman I picked up!!" Good thing he grinned right after saying this-----ever the jokester.

Will update you tomorrow and let you know how things are going.

Love,

Connee

**********************************************************************************

I will try and keep everyone updated. And will keep in touch. Thanks!