Never a boring day...

Well, as I was starting to fear last night, we'd had 2 good nights in a row so last night and today were our 'step back'. Last night they finally gave Haley some more packed red blood cells to get her hemoglobin up, it was low from all the repeated blood draws, etc. With the increased hemoglobin, her low saturations began to climb up to a more normal level and steadied out for the early morning. After two attempts, one last night and one this morning, they finally got her endotracheal tube placed properly again.

Once again this afternoon her saturations started to drift down. The nurse decided to suction her endotracheal tube, which they have to do regularly anyway and which they thought might be causing the lower sats. (Lately they've been running high 60's, low 70's, and they had drifted down into the high 50's.) After taking her off the oscillator to suction her, her sats started to plummet, reaching as low as 9% at one point. They tell me this wasn't technically a code because her heart never stopped, her blood pressure remained good, and amazingly her cerebral oxygenation remained good. But the room rapidly filled with people, lots of drugs were given, and they realized that she had a pneumothorax (air in her chest outside of her lungs) due to the failure of her chest tube to drain - yet again! After pulling off ~200 ml of air, they ordered an emergency echo and an emergency chest x-ray. Basically, the air in her chest outside of her lung was squashing her lung and preventing it from inflating properly. So though her heart was pumping blood to her lungs, there was no air there for the blood to pick up. It took awhile for her saturations to respond even after they removed the air from her chest, but finally it got back up to the 70's. Now, at my insistence, they are manually checking her chest tube to try to insure that it is draining properly every 4 hours. Yet another terrifying day, I'm not sure I can take much more of this...

She has been doing okay since that event earlier today, though her saturations are still a little drifty when they move her around or mess with her. On a good note, she has been urinating a lot! She is actually -300 ml for the day which is great, and the day's not over! Lets hope she can keep it up and doesn't end up needing fluids or anything to take away our little bit of progress. The other good news for today is that she hadn't had anymore seizures for 48 hours so she got to get the EEG off her head! It's so nice to be able to keep a hand on her head again, and it was good because the leads were hard on her skin. And that leads me to another con for the day, she is having a lot of skin sensitivity to all the tape and bandages all over her and even though they'd try to place skin protective barriers for her she still has developed some ulcerated areas. Now they're trying silver impregnated foam, which is antimicrobial as well, between the tape and her skin. Hopefully that will do the trick.

Now we are praying for a boring night, following our much too exciting day. I was feeling very doom and gloom after this second episode, but the doctors all say they are still very optimistic. I pray they are right. I know we will likely be here for a month or months, but I can't wait for the day when we finally 'turn the corner' and get to have a steady climb towards getting better instead of this back and forth business. We just want our Haley-bug back.