Slow and Steady

He’s making progress.

We’re still here, he’s still not the way he’s “supposed” to be.

But he’s getting there.

Yesterday he had come down far enough on his oxygen to try his home support settings.  They worked, but he promptly went back up on his oxygen.  We also started pulling all sorts of nasty stuff from his lungs.  The thought is that with the higher settings, we weren’t able to mobilize it because his lungs were hyper-expanded.  They didn’t have enough room to really collapse enough to be able to move that junk.  But on the other hand, without the hyper-expansion, he wasn’t able to get good gas exchange.  You know, good air (oxygen) in, bad air (CO2) out.

We didn’t make much progress on his oxygen yesterday, but today has been a bit better.  He’s down to 65% right now, awake and playing.  That’s a really good sign.  Once he can be stable on 60%, we can try the home vent.  Then it’s working our way down to what we can do at home.

I’m a little nervous that we haven’t had any setbacks at all, but I’m also hopeful.  He’s now at day 6 of this whatever it is.  Just because the viral panel was negative doesn’t mean there’s not a viral component.  It means that it wasn’t one of the ones they can test for.  But he’s also switched from IV antibiotics to a g-tube one.  In fact, it’s the yummy pink stuff we used to take for ear infections and such. Too bad he doesn’t get to taste it.

So we’re still waiting.  He’s playing, watching TV, being silly with the nurses.  I don’t think we’ll be home this weekend, but I’m optimistically hoping for Monday.  Maybe not.  We’ll see.  But we’re still 10 days out from Christmas.  I’m confident we’ll be home before then.  Until then, we’ll make the most of our time here.

You usually have to wait for that which is worth waiting for. 

Criag Bruce