Paul is in ICU
I did go home late the previous night to try to get some sleep. I was up early and back at the hospital before 7am.
I stayed with him all day. At this point, they are closely monitoring him for a 24 hour period and if they feel he is stable, he will be moved from ICU to a regular room.
His speech is very slurred and he is hard to understand. He gets frustrated because he has to repeat everything he says.
He is not able to move any part of his right side yet. The term the doctor uses is flaccid. He is not numb, if you touch his arm or his leg, he can feel it, but he is not able to move it.
He gets moved to a regular room late in the afternoon. At this point, he has not eaten anything or had anything to drink since the stroke. He can only have wet swabs in his mouth, no liquid.
I asked why he couldn’t at least have water (I thought maybe this was standard protocol in case he need some sort of surgery and I wanted to know how long this would last). They said he could not have any liquids or foods until the speech therapist came to do a swallow test.
Because of the facial paralysis, they have to test him to see if he is able to swallow without choking and if the liquid goes down to his stomach and not into his lungs because of not having control of all of his throat muscles. If liquid or food gets in his lungs he could develop pneumonia.
Based on the swallow test, he is only able to tolerate thick liquids. These are special drinks that come in containers that look like the type of containers Jello or pudding come in that you get at the grocery store. I have no doubt he wished it was jello or pudding!
The thick liquids were thickened water and then and some were fruit flavored. Paul was not a fan…at all. Thankfully on June 1st he did better with the swallow test and was able to move to regular liquids and added mechanically cut food to his diet.
What is mechanically cut food? We’ll talk about that yumminess in the next blog post!
Comments