Dorothy ran a small fever again yesterday. It’s not anything the doctor is very concerned about, though they are going to run another set of cultures and review some chest X-rays to be safe.

They changed her sedation medication yesterday. A side effect of the previous medication was to increase triglyceride levels. Dorothy was experiencing that, so to protect her pancreas and other organs from damage, they initially lowered the dosage. That didn’t work, so they made the switch. The downside of the new medication is that it can take longer to wean off from. The new medication has also increased her heart rate, so they are keeping a close eye on that.

She continues to improve her oxygen levels. In the past two or three days, they have been keeping the ventilator up in the 70 to 80% range when she has been on her back. She is down to 55% today.

The plan for today is to keep on doing the same things they have been and to watch for further improvements.

No real changes for today’s update. There have been no additional fevers, and the doctor is confident that they are treating her bacterial pneumonia correctly. They plan to continue the antibiotics for another three to four days.

The ventilator settings have had to come back up a little bit. She was at 50% this morning. A bit of a side note here. All the time that she has been on the ventilator, they consistently report that she does better when they have her positioned on her stomach, and this when they are able to lower the ventilator settings, but when she gets moved onto her back, they need to increase the settings. They have frequently made comments to the effect that “she likes being on her stomach.” I have to laugh at this, since in 29 years of marriage, I have never once seen her sleep on her belly!

Because of the sedatives and other medicines, her blood pressure has been running low, so they have been providing medication to raise it back up.

The doctor reiterated that he has seen “pretty steady improvement” over the past three days.

Good news today. For starters, there have been no new fevers. They have also positively identified the infections as coming from the lungs, which means that they have been appropriately treating it.

They have also been able to continue dialing down the ventilator settings. It was down to 45% this morning, although they continue to go up and down as needed. Her PEEP (positive end-expiratory pressure, a measure of pressure in the lungs after exhaling) has also been lowered (a good thing), and getting that down further is part of the process of weaning her off of the ventilator.

For the past week, they have been giving her paralyzing medication to prevent her from thrashing about while in the early stages on the ventilator. They have now ceased that treatment. She is still heavily sedated, but the idea is that once they start taking her off of the sedation, they will be able to assess her ability to follow commands.

They continue rotate her from side to side to aid the healing in her lungs. The doctor still expects her recovery to be an ongoing process and that Dorothy will remain on the ventilator at least over the weekend.

Dorothy briefly ran another fever about 8:00 last night, but it passed quickly. They are running cultures to try to determine the cause, but the results are still pending. There are indications that the infection is in the mucus in her lungs. They are continuing the course of antibiotics to treat it.

The good news is that her oxygen requirement is going down quite a bit. She was at 55% of the ventilator capacity earlier today, though they have since had to increase it a bit. At times, it has been at 100%, including as recently as yesterday.

Her doctor reiterated that her progress is as expected and says he has no major concerns.

I had an update from Dorothy’s doctor just now. She is doing all right in terms of the ventilator settings, which they were able to keep steady for the past day.

Unfortunately, did start to run a fever, first at 4:00 this morning with a recurrence at 8:00. They are currently running tests to try to determine the cause, but if it does not recur, there is no real cause for worry. They have also started some antibiotics as a preventative measure.

Otherwise, the doctor says that he has no major concerns. He reiterated that her progress is about on par with what he’s seen with others and that Dorothy still has a long road ahead to recovery.

CORRECTION: The fevers actually occurred on the afternoon and evening of Monday, 25 January at 4:00 pm and 8:00 pm.

A new doctor has come into the rotation and is now managing Dorothy’s case. As expected, he reports that not much has changed. They are able to bring down her oxygen intake through the ventilator for a while, but then have to go back up to where it started from. The bottom line is that things are steady state but not improving. The doctor indicated that this is a pretty common pattern that they are seeing with this type of COVID pneumonia.

Friday, January 8, 2021: In the afternoon, Dorothy began to feel sick. (Rowen and I also got hit with it, but we got over it pretty quickly. Kelvin says that he never felt sick at all.)

Dorothy ran a fever for a while, into Saturday, before it broke. She spent the next couple of days sleeping a lot, though not continuously. On Monday evening, she was cheerful and seemed to be doing better.

However, she went to sleep early on Monday night, and for all intents and purposes kept on sleeping for several days. She woke for a while on Friday night, and still wasn’t feeling all that good, but she was still in reasonably good spirits.

Over the weekend of January 16-17, she started to get worse. She returned to full-time sleeping, but now every once in a while, she would intermittently moan for several minutes before dropping back into sleep. The few times that she was awake, she seemed to be increasingly unaware of her surroundings. I was having a hard time getting her to eat, and I was concerned that going several days with very little food was clouding her mind. I also knew that she wasn’t drinking enough water.

By Sunday night, the moaning had become nearly continuous, and I decided she needed to be at the hospital, and so we went in shortly after midnight on Monday morning.

At the hospital, they found that her oxygen levels were very low (which is the actual reason she was losing awareness of her surroundings). She also tested positive for COVID-19.

Over the next three days, she seemed to be improving. The hospital staff were introducing oxygen through face masks at first, and then via nasal tubes later. We were even able to speak to her by phone on Tuesday night. She was clear-minded and expressed that she was feeling better, and she requested that I bring some personal belongings to the hospital (which I did the following morning).

However, Wednesday night and Thursday morning, things took a turn for the worse. Her oxygen levels plummeted, and she returned to not being aware of her surroundings or being verbally responsive. We made the tough decision to put her on a ventilator at that time.

Since mid-day Thursday (January 21), she has been sedated and on the ventilator. The staff there are periodically moving her from side to side in order to improve her lung condition. The plan has been to give her time so that she is increasingly breathing on her own before bringing her back from sedation.

Today, four days later (January 25), her lung capacity has remained pretty much unchanged, and we are all still waiting for things to improve.

My intent is to use this site to pass along updates on Dorothy as I get them from the hospital staff. At this point, though, it seems like Dorothy has a long road ahead of her, and the situation may not change much from day to day in the short term.