Phalaenopsis damaged and looks like dying but won't drop the flowers

[melimelo]

Is my beloved orchid dying?



I was away for 5 weeks and had a friend coming over to water my plants, including a very healthy, beautiful, vibrant Phalaenopsis, which was happily growing and blooming constantly by this window for the past 1 1/2 year. Despite my written instructions to make sure that my friend never leaves water in the orchid pot and does not water more than once a week maximum, she somehow read it the other way around and not only overwatered it but made sure that she always leaves a lot of water in the pot. On top of that, when she started seeing that my orchid was getting sick - because of the overwatering - she panicked and watererd some more plus started applying a spray mist. When I returned, the leaves had lost their strength, were no longer firm and shiny and two of the bottom ones had turned yellow. The flowers had still not dropped, but they've been frail-looking.



Not knowing what to do, I did not watered at all for approximately 10 days and then took it out of the pot to examine it. A lot of the roots had gone paper-thin and on many of them the bark had gotten so attached it was like it had been glued. After reading posts in this forum I soaked the roots in water, trimmed off the roots that looked dead, separated the bark from those roots that seemed glued and put it back into the same pot. Since then the 2 bottom leaves fell off



and the remaining leaves seem to be getting worse and worse.



[The little burnt spot that you may be able to see on the left top leaf was there long before these problems started, probably from water that stayed on the leaf and caused sunburn...?]

Last week, I thought I detected some mould on 2 roots and after I bought some new bark mixture I cut off those roots



and added only a little bit of the new mixture to the old because the new mixture was very damp and I was afraid I would create more problems.




I don't know what I should be doing. I really love this plant and truly care about it and want to do all I can to help it stay alive. Within a year and a half it grew three spikes with beautiful flowers and up uintil August it was on full bloom. Any advice would be so appreciated. In the past 3 weeks it has only been watered once but it's not dropping off the flowers and it makes me think that the orchid is spending all of its energy on preserving the flowers which in turn damages the leaves... Also, I've just noticed these marks on the spike which didn't use to exist about a week ago.




What should I do to help my plant?


Thanks so much in advance.