Dialysis and Sleep- need them both!

Tuesday, Mar.3/09
Phew! Today was exhausting. We are moving past the problems of breathing, heart function, bleeding and blood pressure. That is really amazing! Now on to the others. We met with the kidney specialists today. So far Scott has been on a gentle, slow dialysis called prisma. His blood pressure couldn't tolerate regular dialysis. Today they decided to stop the prisma at nights now. They will do his regular bloodwork every day and determine if he needs regular dialysis and do it "as needed". There is still hope that his kidneys will recover but only time will tell. I've never been so interested in how much urine a person makes!
The other major issue now is sleep. Scott hasn't slept in at least 5 days and 4 nights. He is becoming delerious. There are now specialists with a plan to look at the meds he has been getting and start trying to figure out why he can't sleep. It's not unusual to have such difficulty in the ICU but this is going on too long. Today Scott was too tired to do any physio and could only keep his eyes open for a little while at a time - though he never slept more than 20 minutes at a time either. It's a real catch-22 again. The less sleep Scott gets the more his health suffers...the more his health suffers the less sleep he gets... and on and on. Hopefully this can be sorted out sooner than later.
On a good note, Scott did get out of the ICU for about a half an hour. We went to the atrium where there are trees and plants and plenty of windows to the sky. Why didn't they do this sooner??? Oh yeah, they have to take about 10 pieces of equipment with them. I guess they're doing it now because he's getting desperate for a change. i really do think it helped too!