The Nightmare Continues

It's another day and Chase is still in critical condition and will likely be in ICU for awhile. They are monitoring him closely. He was in surgery for 3 hours the first evening getting his leg repaired. The orthopedic surgeon had to run a rod from his knee down to his ankle in the center of the larger of the 2 bones in the lower leg.

He has some bleeding on his brain/head trauma that they are watching, the broken leg (both bones) on the right, 3 fractured vertibrae, fractured pelvis, severe bruising on both lungs, one partially collapsed lung and lots of road rash and stitches (his right arm has stitches from mid upper arm clear down to his wrist). The orthopedic surgeon had to open up both sides of his lower leg to try to control the swelling so that he doesn't lose his leg.

The paramedics on the scene who brought him into trauma said they're surprised he's even alive due to the amount of damage to the car that hit him. His organs are working well though so that's good. The doctors and surgeons have been wonderful and are hopeful. This was mostly day 1. Day 2 started out badly for me. I had a bit of a melt down in the morning, but I guess that's to be expected. Chase is still in a coma. He has not regained consciousness at all. He does move around a bit when he's hurting but with the medications he's on and all of that, he stayed still for most of the day today. This morning they were able to take him back into surgery and close up both of the incisions on his leg. So far the leg seems to be in pretty good shape. He had another cat scan this evening because he's not responding like the doctors had hoped (thus resulting in another little melt down for Mom).

The CT scan showed nothing worse or better than yesterdays so I guess that's good that it was at least the same. He did move a little bit tonight briefly. The doctor is re-evaluating his pelvis to make sure they don't need to do surgery on that. The spinal doctor will be evaluating his back as well to determine what needs to be done with those fractures.

He will be having an MRI in the morning to better tell what needs to be done there. He's been on a ventilator that they have been able to switch to a CPAP setting during the day, which means that he is doing most of the breathing on his own with a little assistance from the machines. Last night he did have to have a blood transfusion as his blood count was very low. And tonight he's back on the ventilor until tomorrow morning. At that point they'll try to get him back to CPAP mode.

I know this all sounds kind of jumbled and my thoughts are very unorganized. Please just bear with me since I'm typing things as they come to me. I thank you all for your prayers and for your friendship, love and concern for Chase and for my family. It means so much to us! I will try to keep this updated as often as I can.

Love, Michelle