fighting for his life

James' birthday will be in just over a week. We thought we would be celebrating in the hospital. We never imagined it would be like this. We don't only want lungs. We need lungs. We need lungs now. The wait is harder than ever before. Every minute is longer than the next. The thought of being on hold for transplant is terrifying, but I know that James has to be strong enough for the operation. The fungal infection in his lungs and bacterial infection in his blood are serious enough to threaten his survival. We have to hold onto every hope that James can fight these infections, and become active on the transplant list again. At that point, it will be a matter of finding the right set of lungs. It will be an immediate need.

It was a very hard day for James. The sheer terror of intubation (and everything that it represents) is a source of constant fear and anxiety for him. It impedes the possibility of progress towards extubation. Every moment of breathlessness leaves him shaking and in tears. He convinces himself that he is dying. He cries for me. He pleads for sedation. We did a trial extubation, in hopes of calming James' fears, but within less than thirty minutes, James' carbon dioxide increased dramatically, and James was forced to endure a second intubation. The trauma is impossible to describe. This is a pain worse than the depth of my darkest depressions. It is hard to envision an end to this hurt amidst the intensity of these moments, but I know, in my heart of hearts, that James has a lot of fight left in him. He has incredible strength. There is still hope.