SUN. 07/03/11--FREEMAN I.C.U. DAY 6...ONE YEAR LATER

During Day 6 things took a turn for the surreal...I had already spent quite a lot of time searching google on my phone about different types of pathogens and parasites that could possibly be causing my father's respiratory deterioration.  The possibilities seemed endless, and all frightening, but would almost be welcome if one could be identified as a step toward curing  Dad.  A lot of public attention had begun to focus on fungal infections among tornado victims.  Mucormicosis was the name that identified a deadly tissue-eating fungus found in numerous victims.  It was found to be so lethal it's only cure was surgical removal. The google searching I first did identified similar fungal infections as being cutaneous, pulmonary, cerebral, or systemic.  Up to that point, only the cutaneous version of the deadly fungus had been identified in Joplin.  To my knowledge, thus far only the cutaneous form of it has been identified in Joplin tornado victims to date, more than a year later.   Still, the inability to identify the root cause of Dad's pneumonia in that first week in the Freeman I.C.U. makes me wonder if somehow a fungal infection could have been an influence.  The guys on the fire trucks back in Columbia had google at their disposal as well, and it sounded as though they had taken for granted that Dad's respiratory illness was fungal.  To this point, I don't know if it can be completely ruled out.

But there was one thing that definitely presented as a foreign organism that I myself discovered on Day 6....and it is the weirdest thing I have ever heard of in an I.C.U. anywhere!!!! I'll explain....
When I wasn't helping Mom get around or supporting her in her daily agony seeing Dad suffering on the vent, or googling new nightmarish scenarios of what might be in Dad's lungs, or drawing, I sat there next to Dad...for hours....holding his hand....and doing a continuous cycle of staring at his face, and then starting at the monitor displaying his vital signs, and then staring at the ventilator......I did this continuously, not in any particular order....racking my brain trying to figure out the puzzle of what was keeping Dad from improving....and then I saw something that didn't seem to make sense!  I saw movement in Dad's ventilation tube!  What in the $%#* was that?!!! Something was crawling!!!! There were several small white organisms that resembled tiny maggots, both crawling in Dad's Oxygen supply tubing, and also in Dad's NG tube coming from his stomach!!!!  I called the nurse in and asked if the tubing was a closed system, and showed her what was going on, and we got rushed out, while Freeman nurses, Docs, and the Infectious Control Doc all came in!!

It didn't make sense, and for the most part, the Freeman staff seemed stumped....but though extremely freaky and seeming worthy of a Science Fiction B-movie, I was heartened that this might explain something about why Dad was not improving thus far!!!

They let us back in, after doing Pulmonoscopy and Gastric exams, which showed that nothing was crawling around inside Dad. But this was definitely a very weird twist in the story!! Leave it to Dad to find a way to be unique!!!  Tubing was replaced, and the hope and dominant theory was that something had originated somehow in the tubing itself.  In the morning the off-going nurse checked and found two more of these little organisms crawling once again out of Dad's Oxygen tubing...and was kind enough to put them in a small canister, where they crawled around actively, presumably looking for something to eat, since Dad was no longer available on the menu.

Not quite understanding what was going on, but hoping that it might lead to solving what was Dad's root cause, I drew Dad as the Silver Surfer....the most cosmic and alien of any superhero I could think of to commemorate the strangest experience we had yet up to that point.