Tuesday July 15, 2008

Warning: Mom's had a rough day - so you might want to skip this one and read tomorrow.

Surgery sucks. The surgical procedure isn’t that bad, but the recovery is the worst. The ventilator really messed up Evie’s lungs. Her blood gases haven’t been very good and her x-ray showed that her lungs are all cloudy…something we’ve worked 10 weeks to improve shoots backward in 1 day. She finally got ex-tubated at 12:30 pm and went onto the nasal cannula with very high pressures and pretty high oxygen. Of course, having a tube down your throat is pretty traumatic and causes swelling in the vocal chords and elsewhere and thus the poor girl can’t cry and is really scratchy when she tries to breathe. She’s not a happy camper either as she was so hungry at 2pm that she was sucking ferociously on her pacifier when she wasn’t squirming her head around. She was given Epinephrine blown into her face to help the swelling in her throat and probably some other drugs I don’t know about. Since her lungs were so bad, they started her on the Decadron steroid again. She will get 4 doses over a day (once every 6 hours). They did a culture on her ET tube and found white blood cells and something else indicating possible infection. She is still on her heating table and the nurses are just trying to get her to sleep so that her body can heal. It breaks my heart to see her like that, but they tell me to give her at least 48 hours to recover. And I have to keep reminding myself that it is better than being blind.

Maggie is being Maggie. Silly girl who wakes up before it is time to eat and thinks she is so hungry – but doesn’t take enough to fill her tummy before she gets bored or falls asleep.