Day 19

The unfortunate rule of thumb with strokes is that for every two steps forward that a patient takes, they often take one step back. Burt is no exception. Last night David and Gregory started making Molotov cocktails with bottles of hand sanitizer demanding that the doctor's figure out what was causing Burt so much pain.  At 5 am the new CAT scan results came in and a phone call from a doctor with a very thick accent gave them their answer in morsels of broken English.

It turns out that Burt's stomach pain was not caused by constipation after all, but rather a hematoma in his stomach. This pocket of internal bleeding has come from a broken blood vessel and is contained within the muscles of Burt's abdomen. We thought it was because of the nurse that made him cough for an hour, but the doctors believe it was caused by one of the injections into his stomach.  Either way, if it wasn't one prick, it was another.

The normal course of action with this type of hematoma would be to take Burt off blood thinners, but as his thick blood caused the stroke in the first place — they are slightly between a clot and a hard place.  They are monitoring his blood levels for the red cell count, as it is an indicator of internal bleeding.  So far the numbers have leveled out so that is a good sign.

Tomorrow morning they will perform another CAT scan to check on the size of the hematoma and hopefully it will be unchanged.  If so, they can confirm that the bleeding has subsided and the hematoma will disappear, as the blood will gradually be reabsorbed.  If not, they will switch to a different blood thinner which has a slightly higher chance of helping his blood clot.  The doctor's told Burt that with any luck he will be back in rehab tomorrow.  He replied, "I'll believe it when I see it."

By the way for those of you who are curious, Burt's aggressive bowel regime has landed and we have achieved blast off.  As Burt said, "I hit the crash pad."