Hands On

The past few days, I've just happened to look into Peanut's isolette to check her out and have noticed her doing strange things that really weren't "registering" on the monitor. Yesterday, with her flailing episode...and now today I just got the urge to look at her and noticed her "breathing" hard. Her chest was going in and out, and she was slightly gasping for air...and wasn't vibrating from her vent. I called the nurse over and she got a RT and started moving her breathing tube...she finally stopped gasping and started vibrating again, meaning the vent was working...but after that, she started to desat down to 69 and it took her a good 20-30 minutes to come back from this episode.

The hard part for me was...her monitor wasn't alarming, and she's got a cover over her. You can't hear or see her. The gasping for air is a new one for me...she's been doing different stuff the past few days and after today, I'm afraid to go home. Last night she looked good but her blood gas came back not so good...and they did an X-ray and saw that she had grown out of her tube again...so they pushed it in a little and she got better. Now I'm wondering if there's a certain way the tube should be positioned so it doesn't get stuck or twisted, or whatever in the world it did today?! I don't know how the tube *should* be laying, so I don't know when it looks ok. I'm just afraid she'll be struggling for a long time without someone noticing and it will do her harm. Sure, her vent wasn't helping her out much and she was pretty much breathing on her own...but she still wasn't very good at it...she was struggling. That's a lot of breathing to do all by yourself all at once!

She's going to the bathroom quite well still and they've moved her feeds up to 9 ml, and will increase them by 2 ml every 12 hours until they're at full feeds, which I was told today is 26 ml...once she gets there she'll come off of her TPN and her liver will have an easier time since the TPN can be hard on it. And, she was borderline ready for a platelet transfusion, and her platelets actually went up, so that means she's making them. Good. Every time she gets transfused she puffs up like a croissant and has to have a diuretic to pee off all the water weight...

She got flipped on her belly before I left this afternoon, and was being fed...and was instantly very still and comfortable looking, as always with belly time. I felt ok to leave but now I'm antsy here at home, even worse than before! But I have to clean the house sometime...