Just When You Think You're Through With the Sticky Pads...

...they go and stick more on ya'.

Went back to Dr. Kerr today. The leg's doing better. He's mainly worried about it getting infected so he's pumping me full of antibiotics. My INR was a little higher today so we didn't change the dosage on my coumadin. Hopefully now we can get down to once/week with checking it and I'll catch a break on getting stuck.

The only other news is that when I went in Monday, my blood pressure and heart rate were a little low. We went to taking the beta-blocker once/day instead of twice and after talking to Dr. Mayer, they decided to put me on a 24-hour monitor to see how I'm doing. So I get to walk around with a new accessory until 11:20 tomorrow. I'm sure all the ladies will be jealous. Anyway, if my heart-rate is still too low, they're going to take me off of the meds and if it's fine, we're going to stick to once/day and if it's too high, then we go back to twice/day. No big deal, it's just a little annoying to have to wear this thing.

So it's been an interesting week thus far. All this plus school started this past Monday. It's been a long time since we've had this many updates in a week. I don't know that that's necessarily a good thing but that's the way it goes sometimes, huh?

--Paul

One Day I'll Learn...

...to keep my mouth shut. No sooner than I post about how well I'm doing than the next day, everything goes to pot. Well, maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit, but still. Anyway, I've got an incision on my left groin from where they took some vein out to repair my aorta with. Yesterday I noticed that it looked a little bruised at the end of it and then today I get out of the shower and it's bleeding. So I got on the bed and held some pressure to it and once we got it stopped we put a band-aid on. I was scheduled to get my blood checked today, so I went early and asked the nurse when she was drawing me. They asked me to come back in a little later to let Dr. Kerr look at it.

So I went back to the doctors latter this morning. Turns out my blood pressure and heart rate were a little too low for Doc's tastes and he wants to back off on my beta blocker. He said that the problem with my leg wasn't a big deal, that the area is high-stress from the movement the leg makes and that the skin is thin there anyway. He said it should close up in a day or two and just to keep some bactoban on it and keep it dressed.

So after no real news, I've had a fairly exciting day. My INR (blood thinness measure) was lower today so that was the one bit of good news for the day. Now if we can just keep it steady, we'll be doing good.

Hopefully this leg thing is minor and it'll just heal up and we won't have any other problems. I really think that the dog may have stepped on me while she was in my lap or while we were sleeping or something. That's the only thing that I can think of that would cause something that looks like this. But that's besides the point.

So there you have it, two posts in two days. That hasn't happened in a while. Hope you enjoyed them.

--Paul

The Report Remains the Same

Nothing new to report on this week. We still don't have my blood thinner regulated. We had several good weeks where things seemed to be normalizing and we had decided it was safe to go down to checking it once a week and then Friday it shot up real high (too thin), so now we're back to as often each week as it seems necessary. Hopefully tomorrow it will be better.

I'm sure you've all noticed that as things have improved, the frequency of the posts to the blog has slowed. In all honesty, I'm not quite sure what to do with it now. The general idea right now is to keep posting from time to time and to leave it up in the future for anyone who happens to stumble upon it. However, as many family and friends have made known, there are more than a few of you that have come to rely on the blog as a means of keeping up with Dee and I. As to that, I believe that I may start a new blog on which to keep you all updated as to what's going on in our crazy lives. Thoughts/comments on this idea would be much appreciated.

That's all I got for now.

--Paul